Every week it seems more and more people are asking me how they can run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. Last year David Rodriguez released the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator which aims to simplify the process of installing DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. It was a great alternative to manually deploying DotNetNuke but it required the user to know how to use the Windows Azure Management Portal for setting up their Azure account. The original version of the accelerator also included the DotNetNuke installation package within the download. This meant that the accelerator was closely tied to the DotNetNuke version and had to be updated with every DotNetNuke release.

Late last year, I began work on getting DotNetNuke to run on Windows Azure. After a few months of research and numerous dead-ends, I finally had a fully working prototype. During this same period, David Rodríguez, was also doing some work with DotNetNuke and Azure as well.

After working through a few dead-ends of his own, David found the Azure Accelerator project from Slalom Consulting and decided to use this as a base for developing a DotNetNuke version.

For the last year or so there has been a lot of interest in the DotNetNuke community about how to run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.  Many people have looked at the problem and could not find a viable solution that didn’t involve major changes to the core platform.  This past fall, DotNetNuke Corp. was asked by Microsoft to perform a feasibility study identifying any technical barriers that prevented DotNetNuke from running on Windows Azure.   I was pleasantly surprised by what I found and over the course of the next few weeks I’ll present my findings in a series of blog posts.  Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause, and he is running DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.

• Understanding Azure
• SQL Azure
• Azure Drives
• Web Roles and IIS
• Putting it All together

Part 1: Understanding Azure

Background

Prior to the official launch of Windows Azure, Charles Nurse had looked at running DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.  At the time it was concluded that we could not run without major architectural changes to DotNetNuke or to Windows Azure.  Since that time several other people in the community have also tried to get DotNetNuke running on Windows Azure and have arrived at the same conclusion.  David Rodriguez has actually made significant progress, but his solution required substantial changes to DotNetNuke and is not compatible without also modifying any module you wish to use.

DotNetNuke already runs on a number of different Cloud platforms and we really don’t want to re-architect DotNetNuke just to run on Azure.  That approach was rejected because ultimately Azure support is only needed by a small fraction of our overall community.  Re-architecting the platform would require significant development effort which could be better spent on features that serve a much larger segment of our community.  Also, re-architecting the platform would introduce a significant amount of risk since it would potentially impact every Module and Skin currently running on the platform.  The downsides of re-architecting DotNetNuke vastly outweigh the anticipated benefits to a small percentage of our user base.