CODEWITHSUNDEEP
azure
Moskie
Moskie

Reputation: 1287

Deploying and maintaining multiple copies of the same web application at different URLs on Azure

I'm currently investigating the possibility of my company using Azure.

Our current hosting situation that we run ourselves involves a separate site in IIS for each of our clients, each one having a virtual directory to the CMS we've built with ASP.Net web forms. We can update the contents of that virtual directory, which then provides the latest version of our CMS to all our clients at once.

I'm not looking to recreate that exact situation in Azure, but I am instead interested in figuring out how to create a single Web application in Visual Studio, publish that application to Azure in such a way that multiple sites (that I've specified) are created on Azure. Then I would like to be able to make changes to that application, and publish it again in a such a way that all the sites for it get updated all together, without requiring something be done manually per site/client.

The closest explanation I've found is this one:

http://www.wadewegner.com/2011/02/running-multiple-websites-in-a-windows-azure-web-role/

That gets me close, but what I don't understand is that when I publish this application to Azure, I still only see one application / URL available in the Azure management console. Shouldn't the extra "Site" node result in a different site being available when I publish it? Why doesn't it? Is there a completely separate way to accomplish this that I'm not using?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1228

Answers (2)

Nik
Nik

Reputation: 11

When considering a multi-tenant solution, ideally you should design your web-application as a single website that is capable of responding to multiple tenants (each of your customers), as opposed to creating a website/web-application for each one of them. This makes updates across the system manageable. Your web-application can partition and identity different tenants based on several options such as part of the url (e.g myapp/tenant1 vs myapp/tenant2) or via a host header (e.g. tenant1.myapp.cloudapp.net vs tenant2.myapp.cloudapp.net)

HTH

Upvotes: 1

knightpfhor
knightpfhor

Reputation: 9384

When you look at the management console you're seeing the web roles that you have deployed, not the sites that are part of that web role which is why you're only seeing one. As long as you've followed the instructions correctly, then yes, you do have two sites running. The catch is that you can only access the main site through that default URL. Presuming you have urls that look like customer1.mysite.com and customer2.mysite.com, you need to make sure you've set these as the host headers in the sub sites and then change your DNS so both of these domains point to URL you can see in the portal (e.g. mysite.cloudapp.net).

Upvotes: 1

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