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 limited to 50GB (this includes indices). This might be a comfortable limitation for some web sites, but might be confining for media-rich web sites. Sitefinity providers could be modified to use different databases (for media use Database1, for content use Database2), but even this will cease to scale eventually.
There are alternatives though.
Join the discussion on the Sitefinity forums.
