Yii on Windows Azure anyone?

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

Hello, I know Windows Azure is mostly for brand new developments in ASP.NET, but, has anybody succeded in implementing a Yii-based system on Microsoft Windows Azure?

Thanks.

2

I was asking myself the same question… anyone?

I read this, and it doesn’t look too good…

http://blog.skierkowski.com/2011/09/14/deploying-php-on-windows-azure/

3

Nice finding, wisp. Since I posted my original question, I took a 3 months course taught by Microsoft in my country, and even went to the local Microsoft offices and talked twice to the main Azure gurus in my region. But, since my setup is very complex, and depends on several extensions and *nix commands and programs, they recommended me a careful analysis before attempting any migration, to asses technical and economic feasibility.

Cons: I had a bad experience during the Azure course: an Azure framework update crashed the emulation+publish environment (and I wasn’t working with PHP, it was pure VS2010, C# and ASP.NET), the reason: a known bug patched until the next (?) release. Publishing a simple “hello world” took too long (20 minutes), this time is needed to xcopy the image for the virtual machine, allocate the resources, start the machine, transfer the package and publish the package. This is ok if you’re not updating the app frequently, but not so good for agile or fast deployment, or bug fixes. Since Azure is a PaaS, it has it’s own APIs for storage and so on, and you must be careful to use SQL Server compatible SQL. So, you’re kind of married to MS if you choose Azure, unless you do you’re own factory classes for another PaaS provider or plain PHP hosting. As I said before, Linux-dependant or uncommon setups seem to be hard to port to Azure. APIs and even technical definitions seem to be still changing. Also, as the blog says, documentation is still terrible, sometimes even for VS2010. For PHP, the SDK is not created by Microsoft, but by a third party (it’s built on Zend Framework, AFAIK), technically helped by Microsoft (I guess they have a similar agreement as the Mono Moonlight project).

Pros: It seems to be stable (but read above), the program can start virtual machine instances (they say) if load has a peak faster than when publishing, and they offer a good SLA.

As of today, it looks ok for native (.NET) applications, but I’m still unsure about PHP.

If anyone else has more experiences, it would be interesting to read about them…

4

After surfing around I came to the same conclusion… MS is pushing it as a general cloud platform for about every use case, but in reality, it only works well if you use MS-software like ASP/NET/etc…

Well, phpfog and Heroku seem like good alternatives for fast deployment so I’ll stick to that.