Success story - Azure PaaS deployment

Business pains and challenges

Acora was approached by a well known London based championship football club to discuss their website. The club’s existing web hosting contract, which involved a managed IAAS hosting platform, was up for renewal. A significant part of the service fee was based on providing a managed service wrapper for the IAAS hosting platform. The club was seeking to reduce the current contract value. Their existing sitecore platform was based on a legacy version and they wanted to invest in a platform that would enable future enhancements and minimum support for their web hosting platform, as well as increase its revenue potential.

A key risk to the project was surrounding the existing site’s support capability. It was not known whether the current site would be easily upgraded to the later version without complication.

Acora solution

Acora proposed an Azure PAAS service to address the club’s challenges.

Platform as a Service, often simply referred to as PaaS, is a category of cloud computing that provides a platform and environment to allow developers to build applications and services over the internet.

The site was deployed using Acora’s automation engine, with Azure components deployed and configured based on programmatic code.  This meant that the platform could be deployed, tweaked and re-tested a number of times before being released to the customer.

SQL Server-as-a-service was also deployed to minimise deployment costs when compared to SQL IAAS and to increase or decrease performance transparently at a click of a button.

Business benefits of Azure PaaS solution

• Cost reduction – Significant reduction in operating costs with vastly improved infrastructure platform and an upgraded Sitecore version. Total reduction of 60% in charges against an IAAS platform
• Scalability – The PAAS model will allow the club to easily scale out more capacity as and when they need it
• Easy deployment and minimal downtime – Scripted provisioning of all of the services including the installation of Sitecore which is a big advantage. Deployment within an hour. The unlimited infrastructure is available with no downtime and no managed services need to be implemented on the virtual servers
• Simplified support – Support requirement is lower when compared to IAAS as there is no requirement to manage anything below the Operating system
• Autoscale – the ability to auto provision additional worker roles based on demand.
• Extensive reporting – Extensive performance dashboard and reporting for performance utilisation visibility
• Performance testing – The ability to load test the infrastructure to check for code errors and load test for demand on the website