How To Create A Blog In Windows Azure

New Blog, Building With Azure App Service

Hey there. I'm Jay and I've done a bunch of blogging and videos about MongoDB in the past. Now that I am part of the Microsoft Azure Advocates team, I want to take you all on a journey with me as I navigate my way through the process of understanding all the different options to build really cool stuff on Azure.

So to get started, I figured I'd build a new blog and do it without needing to log into a server. Microsoft Azure App Service has an all-in-one solution for building WordPress that handled all the operational overhead. I clicked on the WordPress in the Azure Marketplace and was able to quickly fire up a solution in only a few minutes.

I used to always concern myself with the PHP installation version or the underlying OS security for the web and database servers. With App Service, I just popped in a few bits of information on the temporary URL provided, the deployment location and MySQL login preferences.

This WordPress solution allows me to offload the MySQL database onto a managed service so I can easily scale up and down the size of the database resources or even MySQL parameters as needed.

Adding more CPU or RAM isn't a problem here thanks to the Azure Portal or just by using the Azure CLI tool that makes modifying your solution pretty simple.

When I think about keeping productive, I just want tools that make deployment easy. My early exposure to Azure has been that the product team has really focused on providing as many simple tools as possible.

My new WordPress blog source is easy to get thanks to "Deploy Services" tools I found early on in the App Service options. I was able to actually configure my GitHub account directly to Azure and specify a private repository to store files associated with my blog. I then set up a Visual Studio Team Services performance tests to run when a deploy happens to ensure my site will respond as I expect.

The Azure portal is highly detailed and intuitive in my opinion. It's helped a ton in getting acclimated to the new environment. Within minutes I had a full solution to build a website that's secured with https, I added a custom domain to use my own URL after I transferred my DNS to the Azure hosted DNS service.

This is step one in a journey to learn how to build, monitor and back up all the things on Microsoft Azure. If you have questions about this post, feel free to reach out on Twitter! Thanks for reading my first post at this new blog!