Sitecore Azure module - Australian datacenters

Up until recently I was working at a client who hosted their Sitecore instances in Azure using PaaS.  By the time I wrapped up they had moved off using the Azure module into a custom CI/CD implementation, but they'd started with the module as it allowed them to get up and running in multiple environments quite easily.  The module is quite easy to use, however we found it just took far too long to actually deploy and was quite inefficient in what was actually packaged and deployed (file sizes could be over 100MB which takes a while to upload).  Depending on at which stage it failed, it could also be quite useless in informing you of what the issue was.

The next couple of blog posts will focus on a few changes we had to make to get the module running correctly for us and a few customizations we made.

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Since we're located in Sydney, right off the bat the first thing we had to do was add the Australian datacenters to the XML.

In Website\App_Config\AzureVendors\Microsoft.xml

<datacenter name="Australia East">
  <coordinates left="88%" top="81%" />
</datacenter>
<datacenter name="Australia Southeast">
  <coordinates left="86%" top="84%" />
</datacenter>

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We found later that we kept getting the error:

Validation Errors: Total requested resources are too large for the specified VM size. The long running operation tracking ID was: <our_id>

The XML is by default configured to use up the entire local storage resources space, and after contacting Azure support we were told that (due to a change in Azure) some space needed to be reserved for system use. They advised 5-10GB.  For example for A3 (Large) which is initially marked as 800GB:

<size sortorder="3" value="Large" cores="4" siteStorageSize="790">A3: 4 cores / 7 GB RAM</size>

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Finally, we found that the naming for the 'optimized compute' VMs (the D-series) were named incorrectly.  To fix, the value attribute should start with "Standard_".

<size sortorder="12" value="Standard_D1" cores="1" siteStorageSize="20">D1: 1 core / 3.5 GB RAM</size>
 <size sortorder="13" value="Standard_D2" cores="2" siteStorageSize="70">D2: 2 cores / 7 GB RAM</size>
 <size sortorder="14" value="Standard_D3" cores="4" siteStorageSize="170">D3: 4 cores / 14 GB RAM</size>
   ... etc.

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The Azure module is great to get up and running quickly, but certainly not the most efficient way of doing continuous deployment.  If you're running multiple environments and doing more than a couple of deployments a week, it's certainly worth looking into a few of the alternatives or asking around on the forum.