Cloudy With a Chance of OneDrive

I’ve been looking at Microsoft Azure for some time – dipping my toe in IaaS to run Visual Studio VMs – but I hadn’t tried any PaaS until now.

My daughter wanted to put the static website that she created for her ICT project onto the “real” web, rather than launching it from disk – so I took this opportunity to look at Azure web apps (previously known as Azure websites).

Rather than using FTP deployment (and downloading FileZilla) there are a variety of deployment options. I chose to use OneDrive sync – because I’m a OneDrive user, this is a personal (not a professional) site and it should be really simple right?

Here are some of the gotchas I ran into:

• There’s a ton of stuff in Azure (and 2 different management portals) so it can all be a bit bewildering – don’t be afraid to try things out, then delete them
• It’s very easy to provision your content in an inappropriate datacentre – make sure you explore all the options under resource groups when provisioning new stuff
• If you do need to delete resources don’t worry about service plans, you can’t delete them manually, they’ll disappear on their own
• Make sure that you use the right folder structure in OneDrive, i.e. Apps/Azure Web Apps/name of your content folder
• If you’re using the desktop client for OneDrive make sure you synchronise that folder so that you can actually see it! I was selectively synchronising folders (to avoid duplicating files saved from OneDrive to my phone) – took me a while to realise this…
• If you need to, use the Debug Console in Azure’s Kudu SCM toolset to browse the virtual file structure of your web app to check that files have synchronised correctly, e.g. https://yoursitename.scm.azurewebsites.net – see these useful posts:

Windows Azure Websites online tools you should know about
How to view, add, edit and remove files in Azure Web App using the Kudu service Dashboard