Commerce Server Blog

Cloud computing.. is a buzz word in today’s IT world. This platform provides web based processing where shared resources, software or hardware are provided to the computers on demand basis. In today’s world, each enterprise application is used only in certain period. For example, Employees go and check their company finance portal (for salary details) once in a month and most of the time the site has less hits and not utilizing the infrastructure resources. As most you knowing about Azure is Microsoft cloud platform and it brings business more advantages which includes reduce costs, flexibility, mobility, fully automation and gives time to think about innovation rather than server maintenance.

Note: Microsoft has not released any information on commerce server on Azure and In this article, I am throwing some thoughts on how to keep commerce sever into cloud. This is a non-tested solution and may or may not work for you.

I worked in many ecommerce applications developed using Microsoft technologies like commerce server, SharePoint .NET, etc. Ecommerce business has give more focus on infrastructure setup (especially on scalability, extensibility and security). Business is very concern about the data and execution (fulfilment process). A hour downtime can bring significant loss ($ or reputation or customer loss) to the business. Through Azure, business never face downtime or scale up/out issues. What if business decides to put their commerce sever application in Azure and I feel this can be achievable .

• VM Role:  Using VM role functionality, we can easily migrate windows based applications to Azure platform. You can host commerce server on Azure VM role, and abstracting the presentation layer to a Azure web role. For existing application, there is some amount of work we have to do here.
• Security: For PCI compliance, enterprise customers may not be comfortable with storing order & profile information off premise in SQL Azure. For this, I would recommend to go through windows Azure connect (previously called as Project Sydney). This enables customers to connect securely their on-premises and cloud servers. Some of the underlying technologies that are enabling it include IP Sec, IPV6 and Microsoft’s Geneva federated-identity capability. It could be used for a variety of applications, such as allowing developers to fail over cloud apps to on-premises servers or to run an app that is structured to run on both on-premises and cloud servers.
• Azure VMs are geared for running stateless services that store their state elsewhere, either on-premise, Azure Tables, or SQL Azure. As you are probably aware, Commerce Server makes heavy use of SQL Server for storage, and a SQL Server running in the VM role would not have its data persisted. The solution works if we go with Microsoft connect services but the disadvantage I am seeing is the performance as commerce server running on VM role and database running in private network. Effective using of Azure AppFrabric (caching technique), we can able to gain some performance.

For past few years, Microsoft has pushed many of their applications (office, SharePoint, sql, etc.) to Azure and I feel, in next few years they will migrate rest of the applications to Azure (as they moved from COM based application to .NE based application) and if this happens each and every shop can have a presence in the cloud. I don’t get surprised if PAN shop (near to my house) have their own website portal (www.madhapurpan.com). =

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