Umbraco as a Service – Do More with Azure

Umbraco as a Service (UaaS) is our old, friendly Umbraco, only a lot more advanced – made to expedite projects and get beautiful, functional websites faster. Anything that can be done in Umbraco CMS can be done in Umbraco as a Service. With more enhanced and advanced features, it’s the best way to create and manage an Umbraco project. It offers team management, automated upgrades, best-practices deployment workflow, and a lot more.

Built on the Microsoft Azure cloud, Umbraco as a Service encompasses web standard approaches and is familiar to all Umbraco users. It provides developers with a perfect online environment for creating an Umbraco website.

Image credit: http://www.tabservice.com

Deployment: Whether you want to update new code, new content, or new media to your website, you can deploy everything with UaaS. From your local Development site, you can deploy to your UaaS Development site, test it there, and then from there, deploy directly to your Live site. Content editors, in the meantime, can continue to deploy content updates from Development to Live right from the Umbraco backoffice.

Git Source Control: UaaS includes auto-upgrades of the Umbraco version, depending on the chosen project type. The service automatically sets up a Git source control, which can be approached from client Git software such as SourceTree. So the idea is to first install Umbraco on the platform and after that, do a Clone of the created repository online.

Git Repositories: All websites managed with UaaS are backed by Git repositories, which is a best-practice to create and manage websites. If you are a developer, you work with the Git repository as a deployment repository extension from your existing Git source control repository. And, if you are a content contributor, any changes you make to your code and HTML are automatically added to your Git repository. You can deploy them using the Deployment workflow.

Automatic Deployment with Kudu: Umbraco as a Service uses Kudu for Git deployments to Windows Azure. The Kudu engine performs an automatic deployment to Windows Azure with every push to the Git repository.

Automatic Upgrades: UaaS keeps your websites up to date with the latest patch release of Umbraco – automatically. It’s done in a safe way and if an upgrade causes your site to malfunction, it’ll roll back to the previous version and you’ll be notified, so you can make any required changes.

Development and Production Separated: One of the major benefits of running a website on Windows Azure is automatic scaling when it faces a huge load. As this feature is not yet supported in Umbraco as a Service, Umbraco has provided a viable alternative – completely separate Development and Production environments. You can use the Development site to create the desired features and content. The Live site can be used for safely running the code and content after getting it proven in Development. A Staging environment can optionally be added to any Standard project if your content creation workflow so requires.

More with Azure: UaaS offers the the latest Azure offerings such as multi-processor, SSD-based virtual machines, and fully-fault-tolerant queues for messages and deployments. This will enable us to make our websites not only more functional but also more beautiful.

Hence, UaaS takes care of everything ranging from installation, infrastructure to security and equips us with the tools to work with our project in the cloud, or clone it (using Git) and work with it locally on any device.

Looking for Umbraco Expertise?