To run Drupal in Azure, we have three options for the infrastructure at the moments, VMs, VMSS and AKS. VMs could be the most straight forward way if you migrate Drupal from on-prem servers. VMSS would be a better option if you want to enjoy the benefit of cloud such as auto scaling. AKS would be the best option if your team is ready to develop and manage containers on Kubernetes.
I put together a set of Ansible playbooks which can be used to deploy a testing environment with Drupal running on Azure VMSS and using Azure Database for MariaDB as the backend database. The code is in this repo. It is just to test and demonstrate the deployment of Drupal on VMSS can be automated with Ansible. It can also be done with ARM template like what this sample shows.
When running the playbooks one by one, the following components will be deployed.
- A vnet with 2 subnets in a resource group.
- A 2 nodes GlusterFS cluster as the file storage for Drupal.
- An Azure Database for MariaDB instance with a database on it.
- A VMSS with a basic load balancer. The VMs in the VMSS are configured to run GlusterFS client, PHP, Nginx and Drupal sites.
One challenge of the deployment is the file storage for Drupal files. When deploying Drupal on multiple servers, it requires a coherent and synchronized file storage. I considered the Azure Files firstly, but it didn’t work well in VMSS scenario. As the deployment script runs on all VMs in VMSS at the same time, the 1st VM creates a file in the shared storage as a lock. Other VMs wait for the 1st VM to complete. Azure Files seems not fast enough in this case so every VM thinks it is the 1st.
I ended up using GlusterFS for the purpose. It works well but I have to deploy additional VMs and configure the GlusterFS cluster. Hope the coming NFS features of Azure Storage would be able to be used to replace the GlusterFS in the future.