Windows Azure Migration Challenges

The below article was prepared based on the Azure SDK 1.8.

• .Net
• Java
• Ruby on Rails
• PHP

Migration is not Free

You can't put an existing application on top of Windows Azure. You must first make some changes to your existing application.

Backup is not there

You can't take a backup of your application in the live environment. Backups are still your responsibility.

Logging in and Debugging require some code

Once you host your application in the production environment, you can't get a good view of what is happening in the production environment. But Azure provides standard log and diagnostic data you want. However you must code and configure your application to request and capture the data.

Data Migration

Where and how to retrieve our application data? The best answer is SQL Azure. SQL Azure is a sub-component of Windows Azure. SQL Azure is fully based on SQL Server 2008 R2, whereas migrating existing data from SQL Server 2008 to SQL Azure is not so easy. But CodePlex provides tools to migrate our local data to SQL Azure and vice versa is also possible.



You can find this tool : http://sqlazuremw.codeplex.com/.

ASP.Net Session State

Many ASP.Net applications use session state to track the state of the user's behavior.
Default ASP.Net supports an INProc state or State Server or SQL Server, but Windows Azure doesn't support INProc mode.

• ServiceConfiguration.cscfg
• ServiceDefinition.csdef

FileSystem Use

Many web applications read and write to the file system. This is a problem in the cloud because your code is running in a stateless environment and could be destroyed and recreated at any time. This is the stateless nature, the local disk is not available for use.

You only use the file system for temporary storage, for that Windows Azure provides a local disk on the server for temporary use. The following are the configuration details to request the local files system for temporary usage. You need to fill in these details in the csdef file.