I am a developer (not server administrator) and ha...
# cfml-general
j
I am a developer (not server administrator) and have been asked to lookin into migrating to an azure hosted cf instance. Any suggestions on good places to to start my research? I noticed that there seem to be some marketplace images. any tips or resources would be appreciated.
f
I think your first question might be who is going to be the sys admin for the servers once they are in azure? I think Media3 is the hosting company that makes the azure images on the marketplace, they are based in Boston - if you are looking to have someone else manage them, that would probably be a good place to start.
j
We have in house server admins that currently manage our existing workloads in azure but they aren't very familiar with the intricacies of CF
f
I don’t think you’ll find tons of Azure and ColdFusion related content, that is because it doesn’t really matter if it is AWS, Azure or under your desk as far as ColdFusion is concerned. There are a lot of things that Azure can offer, but you can look that sort of thing up without the context of CF and you’ll do better
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j
It seems like it should be similar to running cf in vms in win server environment?
f
yeah, it will be same as a VM on windows if that is the environment you are going for
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j
If I'm looking to deploy a single smallish application, is this vm-ish option a good option?
j
Any VM option should be fine for a smallish application. It really breaks down to why Azure? For the bastion VM access? Integration with other Azure products? The price? I typically find it easier to just spin up an AWS EC2 instance and be done with it. Though, I do manage an Azure VM as well. Again, are there other AWS integrations that would make more sense for EC2 as opposed to Azure? They’re both going to be fast and reliable.
j
Thanks all. It was kind of "lets throw all options at the wall" as we were having local stability issues. We have been migrating to Azure for other infrastructure. After some discussion, we decided to build a new vm on a new server locally(our infrastructure).
e
I run a small 'nation" of coldfusion boxes on Azure. how can I help
As for Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and a plethora of other cloud providers, it always comes down to cost, what other services they offer, and what you intend on doing with it all. Azure VMs for example do not auto assign a static public IP, that instead is an option you set up, which allows you to load balance your application. As for stability, the biggest issue is you need to provision your VM first using a Microsoft-provided or approved image. Does not matter what OS it is, I have found that using your own image on Azure is not as stable. The other issue is Azure sometimes will depending on region, weather, and other factors restart your Azure VM without notice. You need to make sure your application service and application can survive an unclean boot, or have proper backups in place. For small application instances, I suggest running a minimum of two instances load balanced in different regions. Azure has a track record of having regional issues that will affect the ability of your application to run. If you are looking for small, personal, or one-off applications that do not need a lot of r maintenance, I would suggest looking at Dedipath, Vultr, Digital Ocean, Hostek, or AWS as an alternative.
j
Thank you, This is very valuable. We are serving several small legacy applications with a decent amount of traffic. We have been having some major stability issues and were thinking about testing out one of the applications in Azure since we have other infrastructure projects moving to Azure. It looks like we found a local solution in the meantime but we may still move some applications we don't eventually replace to a cloud provider.