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Published in the ghost app - Server Fault Question

I am relatively new to this field although I've been a programmer for years.

My company has a website hosted in Azure. I am the one that performs the "Publish" action after confirming that the team finished developing a certain module. However, I have to take the site down on every publish (adding the app_offline.htm while copying dll's, aspx files etc.).

This seems redundant, right? there should be a better way to do it.

I was thinking of the obvious, two servers that while I "talk" to one the other take all the traffic, and afterwards they sync or I can make a publish to the second.

Environment: VisualStudio2013, AzureWebSite, ASP.NET 4.0.

Please share your thoughts, knowledge or even just where should I start my investigation from?

Thanks!

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  • What do you mean by "published in the ghost app - Server Fault Question?" There's no mention of ghost in the SF question, nor any additional reference to it here. Are you referring to the blogging platform? If so, you should edit your question for clarity.
    – David Makogon
    Commented Nov 3, 2014 at 17:00

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If you are publishing the site to a cloud service, then you can publish the site to the staging instance first and then swap over to production after the staging deployment has finished.

The idea being that you'll have version 5 of the website in the production slot and version 4 of the website in the staging slot. You would deploy version 6 to the staging slot and wait for it to finish. Then you can swap the virtual IP addresses once the staging slot is ready.

The swap takes maybe 20-30 seconds so it's minimal downtime.

The added benefit is that if the new version has issues, you can swap again and get the old version back up.

Cloud services from my experience are a bit easier to manage for availability than a VM.

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