30 Minute Deployments on Azure

During the Sitecore Symposium keynote last week, Jason St-Cyr demonstrated how easy it is to get an instance of Sitecore up and running in Azure PaaS.  He stepped us through Azure's set-up wizard.  A few configurations, create a few passwords, and you're up & running -- A round of applause from the keynote audience. 

The next morning at the conference breakfast, I figured I'd give it a try -- to see if it was really that easy.  It took less time to set-up a full instance of Sitecore XP with SXA than it did to finish my powdered conference eggs & bacon.  And, I'm a marketing guy! 

Here's a quick run-through of the step-by-step. 

And that's it.  Azure will churn away for about 30 minutes and then you've got yourself a fully functioning Sitecore application.  The example above is a medium instance of Sitecore XP with SXA installed as a module.  That level (XP3) is expected to handle between 200K and 1M visits per month.  Pricing for that looks something like this...

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Azure references this Sitecore knowledgebase article for some intel on sizing your Sitecore implementation. 

You rarely see something this complex presented to the end user in such a simplified way.  Azure's has become our go-to option for hosting.  We expect that trend to continue.