Last week, Matt Cooper was able to get the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA running in the cloud (using Azure & SQL Azure).  Matt was kind enough to share a lot of feedback in the forums about how this was accomplished.  He has now assembled these experiences into a blog post and a video.

[ Be sure to read the full blog post on Matt’s blog. ]

How was it done?

One of the first things Matt wanted to determine is whether Sitefinity 4.0’s database schema was compatible with SQL Azure:

So the first task was to see if the database can be easily moved to SQL Azure

As Matt describes, SQL Azure is still SQL, but some features are missing:

Although  SQL Azure is essentially a high availability 2008 SQL instance, because of the architecture of the system some features on standard 2008 are not available. For ...

It looks like Matt Cooper’s insomnia resulted in a wonderful experiment.  Matt was able to get the Sitefinity 4.0 BETA running on Azure and SQL Azure. 

Click here to see Sitefinity 4.0 running in the cloud

This is just the beginning of the conversation though.  Telerik has long expressed an intent to have Sitefinity running in the cloud.  Cloud platforms offer the promise of elastic computing.  The idea that server resources are virtual and can be scaled up & down (dynamically) to handle real-time demand. 

However, web applications need engineered to be infinitely (or massively) scalable.  For one, web sites can’t utilize server-specific session state.  There is no guarantee that a web site visitor will be returned to the same server.  Thankfully Sitefinity 4.0 is naturally stateless.  Having multiple front-end servers will not pose a problem.

However, the persistence layer poses another challenge.  SQL Azure databases, for example, are ...