I have a few opinions on the topic.
Today in our current implementation we use the cloud at SHI in an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model upon which Virtual Machines are hosted. With this model it makes little difference other than price and performance from a host such as SHI, Amazon, Azure etc…
Another supported configuration is to use the Azure Cloud in a Paas (Platform as a Service) model upon which the application and sql database are provided while abstracting us from the infrastructure.
To me Azure is the natural cloud for Sitefinity, as it is the cloud provider with whom they show the most support. A lot like installing PHP on Windows, it’s just not natural – though it’s done and it works – it just seems off. Azure is the only cloud provider that Sitefinity supports in a platform as a service model. On Amazon you would be able to achieve this with storage, but not the application and database. This is a similar model to what our infrastructure team is currently investigating with Office365 PaaS to reduce the complexity of managing their hardware and systems, and would be prudent for us to at least consider as well. It provides the ability to remove yourself from patching OS’s and maintaining hardware etc…
http://www.sitefinity.com/benefits/for-it-managers/windows-azure
This would utilize Azure Cloud Services http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cloud-services/ to run the application replacing all webservers. It would use Azure SQL Database http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/ for the database replacing the need for maintaining SQL Servers. And it would utilize Azure Cloud Storage http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/ for sitefinity’s external storage location which can also be leveraged to provide CDN functionality as an option directly within Azure storage.
On Amazon’s cloud we could utilize an IaaS model for our web and sql servers. Sitefinity does not support Amazon RDS http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ so we cannot do the same as you could with SQL Azure. We could still utilize amazon s3 http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ for external storage and pair that with a separate product Amazon CloudFront http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ for CDN.
Today in our current implementation we use the cloud at SHI in an IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) model upon which Virtual Machines are hosted. With this model it makes little difference other than price and performance from a host such as SHI, Amazon, Azure etc…
Another supported configuration is to use the Azure Cloud in a Paas (Platform as a Service) model upon which the application and sql database are provided while abstracting us from the infrastructure.
To me Azure is the natural cloud for Sitefinity, as it is the cloud provider with whom they show the most support. A lot like installing PHP on Windows, it’s just not natural – though it’s done and it works – it just seems off. Azure is the only cloud provider that Sitefinity supports in a platform as a service model. On Amazon you would be able to achieve this with storage, but not the application and database. This is a similar model to what our infrastructure team is currently investigating with Office365 PaaS to reduce the complexity of managing their hardware and systems, and would be prudent for us to at least consider as well. It provides the ability to remove yourself from patching OS’s and maintaining hardware etc…
http://www.sitefinity.com/benefits/for-it-managers/windows-azure
This would utilize Azure Cloud Services http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cloud-services/ to run the application replacing all webservers. It would use Azure SQL Database http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/sql-database/ for the database replacing the need for maintaining SQL Servers. And it would utilize Azure Cloud Storage http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/ for sitefinity’s external storage location which can also be leveraged to provide CDN functionality as an option directly within Azure storage.
On Amazon’s cloud we could utilize an IaaS model for our web and sql servers. Sitefinity does not support Amazon RDS http://aws.amazon.com/rds/ so we cannot do the same as you could with SQL Azure. We could still utilize amazon s3 http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ for external storage and pair that with a separate product Amazon CloudFront http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ for CDN.
