Enabling web farms on Azure Web Apps

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Azure Web Apps (renamed from Azure Websites, see details) allow you to scale the computing power allocated for your web app on Microsoft Azure. This feature allows you to increase performance and throughput for your web app. See How to scale Web Apps article for details.

For this functionality to work in Kentico, you need to enable and configure the Web farm module in your Kentico web app.

We only support this functionality for web hosting plans with a Basic or higher pricing tier.

After you create an Azure Web App with a Kentico application and deploy it using Visual studio (see Microsoft Azure Web Apps), enable and configure web farms in the Kentico system:

  1. If you have already scaled your web app to 2 or more instances, scale it back down to 1 instance:
    1. Open Windows Azure Management Portal and select your web app.
    2. Switch to the Scale tab.
    3. Set the Instances count to 1.
    4. Click Save in the bottom panel.
  2. Open the Kentico administration interface of your website.
  3. Open the Settings application and open the Versioning & Synchronization -> Web farm category.
  4. Make sure that the following check-boxes are selected:
    • Enable web farm - enables the web farm functionality.
    • Use web farm database updater - enables the database updater web farm synchronization mechanism which uses the database for notifying web farm servers about changes. See Web farm synchronization mechanisms for details.
    • Generate servers dynamically - allows the system to generate web farm servers dynamically according to the allocated computing instances.
    • Delete generated servers on application end - this settings ensures that the system does not generate more web farm servers than needed.

The system is now prepared for increasing and decreasing computing instances (you can scale your application through the portal on the Scale tab) and will generate web farm servers and synchronization tasks automatically.