Umbraco Cloud launched back in 2015 as Umbraco as a Service. With this launch, we made it possible to start Umbraco with a single click on a platform that allows for multi-environment set-ups complete with code and content synchronisation.
Umbraco Cloud has not only made it easier to use all our products, but also had a positive impact on the products themselves. It has helped drive numerous initiatives in the Open Source CMS, improvements across all our software offerings and lifted our customer service and communication efforts. It opened up an entirely new way for Umbraco to interface with our customers and community, getting us closer to real-world Umbraco installations and more importantly, much closer to the people working with Umbraco on a daily basis.
We are constantly revising and improving features and services to ensure we can continuously live up to the goal of Umbraco Cloud: Being the best place to host your Umbraco solutions and making it easier, friendlier and more fun to work with Umbraco. To help us achieve this going forward, we want to make several improvements over the coming months. We now have years of experience to build on. New technologies and conventions have surfaced, especially with Umbraco on .NET Core getting closer and the growth of cloud based tools available to us. Umbraco Cloud will be able to take full advantage of the opportunities this brings to empower developers and expand on hosting capabilities.
Over the past year, we’ve been working intently on distilling all the learnings to a roadmap for what Umbraco Cloud should like in the future. We are now on a clear path to improving Umbraco Cloud and ensuring it is also the best solution for working with Umbraco in the future.
To deliver all that we want, both now and in the future, we need to change the underlying infrastructure of the web hosting platform of Umbraco Cloud. Simple as that. We are moving away from an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based solution to one where Umbraco Cloud is more closely integrated with Azure's native Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering (Azure App Service). Umbraco Cloud already today utilizes several other services from Azure, so this is a natural fit for the platform.
“I’m quite excited about the flexibility that this new infrastructure will give us. There are so many features that we’d love to provide as part of Umbraco Cloud. The first one we can check off the list is HTTP/2 and from there we start working our way up and expanding the reach of Umbraco Cloud with the service being available in multiple regions. Umbraco Cloud will be the best place for hosting your Umbraco based website and we look forward to supporting your digital business needs and developer workflows.”
- Morten Christensen, Azure Hero and lead architect on Umbraco Cloud
This will benefit existing and future Cloud, Uno and Heartcore projects and, importantly, open up for a whole range of exciting opportunities, features and capabilities that we simply cannot achieve with the current setup. That being said, we’re working hard to make the transition as smooth as possible for all our customers.
There are big changes coming but we’re there every step of the way, making it easy and seamless and we'll make sure to communicate directly if there is anything you, as a customer or partner, need to be aware of or assist with in relation to the migration.
The initial roadmap was developed internally and subsequently we’ve worked in collaboration with Microsoft and additional partners to ensure we’re making the most of what Azure has to offer as well as taking advantage of other services that will help us achieve a smooth transition to the new infrastructure.
We’ve already released the first set of related features and improvements to Umbraco Cloud. These are focused on making it possible to migrate (lift & shift) existing projects to the new platform seamlessly and also have added benefits for our current platform.
These features and services are either currently in development or recently released. They add benefits to existing projects as well as enabling us to migrate efficiently to the new infrastructure.
The initial focus will be on repurposing many of the existing Umbraco Cloud services and features to work with the new setup and decouple them from the current infrastructure.
Throughout the migration process we’ll keep a steady cadence and ensure monitoring and clear communication on the process. We will handle the migration of all sites. If your involvement is needed for the migration process, we will reach out in due time to plan this out. When we get closer to the release date there will be more detailed communication on what the migration entails.
With a new underlying hosting platform in place we have the foundation for enabling a range of new features on Umbraco Cloud. We want to open up for hosting your project in other regions in addition to the current one (West Europe), enable further CDN capabilities for Media and Content, provide the ability to schedule automatic upgrades and much more.
As you can see from the above we are well underway with a new and improved infrastructure for Umbraco Cloud. We are really excited about it and all the opportunities it opens up to enhance the overall experience and service we can provide on Umbraco Cloud.
In the beginning of the new year, we will publish a blog post where we dive into the new architecture and provide more details on the roadmap. I’ll also update you on the progress we’ve made but do keep an eye on the bi-weekly Product Updates on the blog where we’ll make sure to chronicle the progress as well.
If you have any feedback you’re, as always, welcome to reach out on product@umbraco.com. For project specific questions and concerns reach out using your support channel, either the Cloud chat or at contact@umbraco.com.
Approaching the end of the year and it's still full steam ahead for Umbraco HQ and the community 🚂
A release candidate is out for Umbraco 8.10 with more than 100 features and improvements, new release of Umbraco Forms and a patch for Umbraco Deploy on the way. You'll also get an update on Deploy on Premises, Umbraco on .NET Core and the next chapter for Umbraco Cloud 🚀
So many great things to talk about - Let's get to it!