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Status on new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure, March 2021

The new infrastructure is ready for migration

Morten Christensen
Written by Morten Christensen

Mid-March was set as the goal for when the new Umbraco Cloud infrastructure would be ready for migration of existing customers - and we’re on track. We’ve started successfully migrating the first projects from the existing to the new infrastructure. In this status blog post, we’ll update you on the migration process and what you can expect in the coming months.

A brief summary of the project: The new infrastructure for Umbraco Cloud will provide a state-of-the-art development experience as well as increased stability and allow us to expand the service and feature set drastically in the future.
We’ve previously published 2 status blog posts announcing and detailing the new infrastructure on Umbraco Cloud. This is a follow-up to these blog posts:

The new Cloud infrastructure is ready!

Over the past week, we’ve moved internal projects to the new infrastructure. This means the first sites are already running on the new and improved Umbraco Cloud. We’re happy to report it has been a smooth process and has helped us create a detailed plan for the migration of existing customer projects.

Migrating to the new infrastructure

Migration of existing Cloud projects is the next big and exciting step in order for every customer to benefit from the new infrastructure. There is a significant change to how projects are provisioned, upgrades are handled and how the filesystem works. All of the above are infrastructure-related and will not change your day-to-day experience of working with Umbraco Cloud. Thus, you can continue to use the workflows, deployments and so forth as you’re used to after your project has been migrated. 

You should however expect improved stability, increased performance and even better up-time stats. Finally, it allows us to keep expanding the features and benefits for you on Umbraco Cloud. 

What will change under the hood?

As mentioned above, you will not see any changes in your day-to-day use of Umbraco Cloud. 

Under the hood, a lot of things have changed though. Everything is still running on Microsoft Azure but we’ve moved away from Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, provisioning and managing VMs) to Platform as a Service (PaaS) utilising Azures AppService to host sites. This provides a larger degree of flexibility and scalability to the entire Umbraco Cloud platform. 

On top of all the new things we’ve already enabled, such as Single Sign-on and new hostname/SSL service, moving from IaaS to PaaS has also meant an overhaul of project orchestration, deployment service, automatic upgrade service. We’ve added more monitoring and reporting to each of these parts, which will help us to continuously improve our services and enables us to provide more detailed reporting on resource consumption, performance metrics etc. to Cloud users.

Prepare your site for the upcoming migrating

There are a few requirements that have to be met before a project can be moved to the new infrastructure. These all help to ensure a smooth migration with minimum impact on running projects:

  • Media served from blob storage - DONE
    We have completed the migration to Cloud storage for all eligible projects.

  • Updated DNS settings - you might need to update settings
    Your projects need to be updated to use the new DNS settings. If you aren’t using this already you will be contacted directly to update your DNS entries. You can find a guide with all the details in the Umbraco Cloud documentation.

  • Minimum versions for Umbraco CMS - you might need to upgrade your project(s)
    As we get ready for the new infrastructure, we are aiming to reduce the number of versions currently present on Umbraco Cloud. By helping customers get to the latest versions, we can improve security, stability and overall experience of using Umbraco Cloud.If you have projects on versions 8.6.6, 7.7.7 or earlier, we highly encourage you to upgrade to the latest minor and patch version and if possible, do this within the next 2 months. Minimum supported versions will be:
    • Umbraco 8.6.7 for version 8 projects
    • Umbraco 7.7.8 for version 7 projects.

You can find more information in the documentation article for upgrading to the latest minor or if you’re using the UaaS.cmd tool refer to the manual upgrade documentation.

Projects that do not meet the requirements, will not be part of the initial migration to the new infrastructure. We know this requires additional work from you and are thrilled to see how many have already updated their projects and settings - thank you! As always, you’re welcome to reach out to us in the Umbraco Cloud chat or on contact@umbraco.com if you have any questions or concerns.

When will your project be migrated?

Within the next few weeks, we are planning to start the migration of customer’s projects. We’re initially focusing on our Pro and Enterprise customers and will do small batches in the beginning. With these initial migrations, we’re in direct contact with our customers so they can approve the timeline, get direct reporting on the process as well as being able to approve and confirm each of the steps. We’re doing this to ensure our customers have confidence in the process and we will then work to expand the automation of the process as well as complete a migration schedule for all remaining sites. 

If you haven’t received direct communication from us yet, don’t worry, it will come. We’re extremely excited for all the benefits the infrastructure brings and naturally want everyone to migrate as soon as possible. We will contact you when it's time to migrate your project(s). 

What actions do you need to take for the migration? 

Aside from meeting the prerequisites listed above (blob storage for Media, updated DNS settings and minimum required version of the CMS), there are no additional actions required from you. We will reach out directly about the migration when the time comes.

We encourage you to add (or update) technical contacts for your projects (this can be done on the team Settings page for each project) and sign up for notifications on status.umbraco.io. If you have any questions, you’re always welcome to reach out to us using the support chat in the Umbraco Cloud portal, create a ticket if you have a support agreement or write to us at contact@umbraco.com

Keep an eye out for the next update

We’ll provide another status update on the new Cloud infrastructure within the next month, with a progress update on the migration. Here, we’ll detail what the migration entails from a technical perspective (this will be communicated directly to the initial batches of projects) as well as the plan for when new projects can be created on the new infrastructure (ETA Q2, 2021).

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