In the website business, you often hear about revolutionary services, industry leading solutions, and innovative products. All too often, these products garner plenty of buzz, but fail to meet expectations and don’t ultimately affect the life of the website administrator.
In reality, one of the places website administrators, marketing teams, and developers spend the most time is managing their data – a task that many would rather not have to worry about.
Here at Americaneagle.com, we’re a proud implementation partner for Sitecore and Windows Azure. Having recently completed a Sitecore Azure implementation for one of the nation’s leading credit unions, it became very clear that the paired services of Sitecore and Azure are the perfect solution for the client who requires enterprise-level website administration with cloud computing.
The Skinny on Sitecore & Windows Azure
For those who aren’t familiar with the Sitecore and Windows Azure, Sitecore is a leading content management and marketing platform. Microsoft Windows Azure is a cloud computing platform used to host and scale web applications through Microsoft data centers.
Sitecore Azure Edition, a Sitecore CMS add-on, utilizes the considerable benefits of Azure for scalable, cloud-based, enterprise-class deployment. These products work well together as both Sitecore and Azure provide seamless API integration and both companies use the best practices in terms of system architecture. Together, they offer a solution that lets you manage the data you care about – your website content. In the meantime, it takes care of the operational processes you don’t have the time to regularly manage; Azure manages all load balancing, installation, and operational maintenance automatically.
Some of the main perks of Sitecore Azure Implementations include:
- Fully automated self-service platform that allows customers to pay only for the resources their application uses.
- Guaranteed 99.95% uptime
- Infrastructure does not need to be held or managed locally
- Easily scalable applications
- Shorter time to market for new projects, and instant deployment always available
- Data centers are accessible globally. Azure allows customers and partners to scale websites to new geographic locations and quickly and easily respond to peaks in demand.
How Americaneagle.com Implements Sitecore Azure
For this particular project, Sitecore provided a layer of abstraction that helped our programmers as they utilized Sitecore built-in modules to interact with Azure. We were then able to deploy databases, deploy source code, and create an Azure package directly from the Sitecore CMS control panel! Sitecore then automatically converted the application to use a session provider that worked for Azure, updating the configuration files. This automation was very useful to our programmers as it saved them time. The infrastructure we set up for the client allows them to deploy a new version of the code at any time during the day with no down time – that was very important for the client, because it’s related with SLA and high availability.
We are very proud and excited to be an official implementation partner for both Sitecore and Azure and look forward to continued growth and success for our clients.
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