Connection strings on Azure PaaS
XSL transform connection string file into JSON
After you have provisioned your Sitecore application in Azure PaaS, you will notice that in the webroot the connectionstring file has been generated in <<webroot>>/App_Config/ConnectionStrings.config To improve security, in Azure, you have also the possibility to store and manage the connection strings on the app service. Copy pasting all the connection strings from the original […]
Sitecore logging fundamentals – Azure PaaS
In the first part of this series, we talked about the relation between Sitecore.Diagnostics.Log, Log4Net and Microsoft’s Logging Abstractions with ILogger. Let’s take things a step further and have a look at the logging mechanisms in Azure PaaS. Application Insights In our PaaS solutions we can use Application Insights to diagnose our applications. In application […]
Testing in production
No more swapping!
When running Sitecore on Azure PaaS, you are most probably familiar with deployments slot and swapping. By using a deployment slot, you can deploy you code to the slot, whilst your production environment keeps your website live. By hitting the “swap slots” button, the production and deployment slot are swapped, and the visitors arrive on […]
Clear caches on CD instances in Azure PaaS
An introduction to Azure Service Bus
Azure PaaS is a wonderfull platform to host your Sitecore solution. It provides maximum flexibility to outscale your individual components. In a typical scaled setup (XM or XP) the CM and CD are splitted. The CD server is usually outscaled to multiple instances. The downside of this is, that you are not able to browse […]
Sitecore WarmUp Azure for Outscaling
Outscaling on Azure without traffic loss
In a previous post on warming-up your environment, I talked about warming up the cm environment via a powershell script on the build server. This script is usefull because it logs in to your environment before making subsequent calls. In this post, I want to talk about initializing your azure web application before allowing traffic […]
Part 5: Deployment Slots
Sitecore 9 in Azure Paas for Dummies
Preface In this final post of the Sitecore 9 in Azure Paas series we are going to customize the ARM templates to support deployment slots. Creating deployment slots in Azure In this tutorial, we will add the deployment slots manually to our Azure setup. So we will not modify the templates to include in the […]
EXM Renderer URL on Azure Paas
When using Sitecore Email Experience Manager on Azure PaaS, you might run into the error: System.Net.WebException Message: Unable to connect to the remote server An attempt was made to access a socket in a way forbidden by its access permissions 127.0.0.1:80 The cause of this error, is that Sitecore tries to display the message by […]
Part 4: Adding modules to your ARM templates
Sitecore 9 in Azure Paas for Dummies
Preface In this fourth post of the Sitecore 9 in Azure Paas series we are going to add custom modules from the marketplace to our Azure PAAS solution and add them to our ARM templates so that they are automaticly deployed. In this post, we will show you how to add the Sitecore Powershell Extentions to our […]
Part 3: Deploy your custom code
Sitecore 9 in Azure Paas for Dummies
Preface In the first part of this series, we provisioned a brand new out-of-the-box Sitecore 9 on Azure PAAS with the help of ARM templates. In the second part we created a blue-green deployment environment in order to have a clean deploy with each build but keeping the databases intact. In this third installment of […]
Part 2: Redeploying sitecore without provision infrastructure
Sitecore 9 in Azure Paas for Dummies
In the first part of this series, we provisioned a brand new out-of-the-box Sitecore 9 on Azure PAAS with the help of ARM templates. Our next step is to make sure, we can redeploy the applications with the help of those templates. Why? We want a clean deployment everytime we add code. We want to […]