Hey, friends!
I'll bet you know that WordPress is the most popular content management
system powering over 43% of the websites on the internet.
But I bet you didn't know that WordPress is not only available on Azure
App Service, but we're adding over 3500 new WordPress sites on Azure each month.
Tulika Chaudharie is here to show me how easy it is to get started today
on Azure Friday.
Hey, friends! I'm Scott Hanselman and it's Azure Friday.
I'm here with Tulika Chaudharie. How are you?
I'm doing good. How are you, Scott?
I am very excited.
I had no idea there was so much WordPress on Azure.
That is fantastic.
I love Azure App Service. And I love WordPress.
It is so easy to design and create your site on WordPress.
In fact,
I'll show you my site in a little bit, which I put up in the last 30 minutes.
But let's go ahead and start and how you can create a WordPress site.
We start with the marketplace.
So you can go to Marketplace and search for WordPress
or an App Service which will bring you right to our offering
and just hit the create button,
which states you write to the create screen.
We've tried to make it as easy as possible for you to create a
what inside.
I'm just going to change the location to be
something else.
And you can change your hosting plan.
The hosting plan determines what kind of SKU you're going to use
for your App Service.
You can change it.
And we have SKUs which is available for all kinds of users.
A basic SKU for the hobby is a standard SKU for general purpose and a premium SKU.
If you have a really heavy workload.
Notice that, you know, that's all you need to do.
You need to give a name for your site and you need to give a username password,
which is for the admin persona.
So what brands has two personas?
One is the main site persona, which your blog that everybody's
going to browse to and your admin panel where who is going to put all the content.
So you can give your username password over that
and you can hit the create button right here and you're done.
But sometimes
you might want a little more configuration
and one of the things that you could do is hit the advanced button over here
and you will see that these are some of the things that we recommend.
We do it by default for you so you don't have to worry about it.
But in case you want to go ahead and check and change some settings.
So we automatically configure Azure CDs for you.
This automatically creates a profile and an endpoint for you
so that all static content is squashed on our CD servers
in case you don't want to use it yet, but
want to take advantage of your front door, which is the Microsoft modern screen.
In that case, you can uncheck this box and enable front door,
and this will now work as a reverse proxy where there are 118 locations
on which your content will start getting cached.
And those are the locations. So the content from
there's also a block storage integration.
So by default, observers does provide you with storage,
but sometimes you want something which is a little faster.
And over here will allow you to enable blocks
or especially if you got a website which got a lot of media and content
that you might want to use your own block storage account.
And finally, you have the virtual network.
The virtual network.
Again, you don't need to worry about it.
This is a network because we are creating multiple resources like your VM,
which is going to host your site, your database.
We want them all to reside on the same network.
So that's why we automatically create a virtual network.
But you can use an existing network if you have one.
So once you've got the settings, just hit review and create
and this will start creating your WordPress site.
You know, what I like about this is,
you know, I've created a million App Service sites myself.
But what you've done here is you've really
created a create screen
that is custom to WordPress, that is the best practices.
It really is the perfect example of best practices because I could go
and make an App Service myself.
I could try to deploy WordPress, but I'm going to say, Oh, you know,
I forgot I need to clean and, you know, do I need my skills or I need my skill
flexi server And you've brought all of the best practices into one single.
You know, pane of glass, one page. Yep.
And that's so easy.
That makes WordPress so easy to configure on that service.
Yeah.
So I love having best practices set up for me
so we can click.
So review and create and that's going to create your site.
I'm not going to do this right now because it takes about 15 minutes
to create the site, because under the hood
what we are doing is we are provisioning the site for you.
We are downloading the WordPress image, adding all the customizations
that you see over there.
So it takes about 10 to 15 minutes for the site to provision.
So instead of that last night, while I was thinking about the
presentation, I thought I'll set up my own WordPress site.
And I took about 30 minutes.
So recently, during the last two years
of acquired a new hobby, which is painting.
So I decided that I'm going to create my own portfolio.
So this is my WordPress site.
It is just an app.
So so which you can see right from here.
The name is the app name Dot Azure website stuff,
which tells you that it is just an App Service.
And the cool thing about word process,
it's got so many teams and plugins that you don't have to
even if you're not a designer, you don't have to really think a whole lot
while you're trying to design your site.
So this is my website and these are some of the paintings I've done.
I thought this is a good opportunity to showcase my paintings in case anybody
is looking to give me some commissions.
Let me ask you this, though,
so you easily and quickly created your own website,
whether it be for your paintings or your,
you know, your hobbies or whatever you're interested. Maybe a small business.
But how do you know that it's going to be kept up to date,
have the right version of the right version of Linux?
You want to focus on painting and your hobbies.
You don't want to focus on making your site secure and safe and scalable.
Exactly.
And so under the Hood, App Service is a fully managed platform,
which means that we take care of maintaining the PHP version, the
my mythical version, and also the Linux versions on which the site is running.
We automatically will do the update for you and manage everything for you.
So in fact, I can go to the dashboard right now and you can,
since I'm on the admin persona, I can go to the dashboard for my site
just right here
and you can see
that we are running WordPress 6.2, which is the latest version of what press
we are running, 8.1, which is one less than the latest version.
We are going to go to 8.2 in the next couple of weeks.
So you can see that and we automatically maintain this for you.
The things that we don't automatically update for
you are like plugins and things, so you can have your own.
We reinstall some teams and plugins for you,
but we don't automatically update it for you.
And the reason for that is we don't know if we update the theme that might break
certain things on your site.
So we encourage you to go and update your themes
and plug it on yourself rather than we automatically doing it for you.
Right. That makes sense.
But I understand that you do install plugins
and configure them for performance because things like W3 total cash.
So really popular in common plug in.
But honestly, I wouldn't know how to install it and set it up for Azure.
Can you actually do that for me?
Exactly.
So you can go over here and look at your install plugins
and you can see that we installed three plugins for you.
One is the anti-spam plugin just to make sure that you know,
you don't get malicious attacks.
And the two other plugins which we specifically install for
performance reasons as mush, which magnifies
your images and improves performance and improves SEO with your site.
And we also do W3 total cache now
remember how in the create experience we were adding a CD in.
What it really does is the endpoint of the CD is configured into Google cache.
So which means that every time now you request a page,
it goes to the cache page and tries to get it from the cache.
I can show you how it looks from the settings itself.
And if you go to the settings,
you can see that
it has automatically set up the CD end for you.
And the CD is Microsoft Azure Storage.
Remember that small checkbox over there where I said enabled storage?
It created a storage account for you, and in the storage account
you can go and look at the storage account to
to you can see this is the account name.
It has set up your account key, your container
SSL support, and this is your storage.
You are the end point.
You are, which is automatically set.
So by default we cache all our content for seven days.
Unless of course you've changed the cache control header and made it private.
In that case, obviously we don't
do the caching, but otherwise your content is cache for seven days.
You can pull your customers from here, you can
use the cache shows, you can change the time on how long
you want the cache to be available and so on, which allows you
to completely manage your cache and improve performance for your site.
You know what's nice about this is you set this up to be powerful
with a lot of settings and options for the professional for the Azure familiar.
But for regular folks,
they want a WordPress site, they want to think about these things.
They can use the default template,
the default settings, and they can spend their time
customizing their plugins and their themes
and they really don't have to worry about the day
to day running because as you said before, App Service is a managed platform.
Exactly.
So we take all the management overload from you
and you just concentrate on stuff you do well, which is designing your website,
setting up your e-commerce site or whatever you want to use what's for.
But I had all I was going to say, if I had an existing WordPress
site on another platform, would it be hard to get over to Azure?
So we WordPress by default
provides a plugin which allows you to do migration.
So there are two ways of doing a migration.
One is that you can do a manual migration and the second is WordPress provides
a plugin that you can install so you can create a WordPress side,
install the plugin and then specify where you want to migrate from.
And if it's an on premises site, do it from the on premises site.
But I also want to mention that we are working on a migration tool
which will make this much more easier for you so you can provide a source
and a destination and will automatically do the migration.
So hopefully in the next two or three months
we are going to release a new tool which does the whole migration for you.
Very cool, very exciting.
Since this is an App Service.
Another thing that you can do, you can manage it just like an App Service.
So you can go to your app.
So this is my app that I was showing you earlier
and you can go to your app and you can manage everything for your app.
Some of the things that you might want to do is
you might want to scale up or scale out your App Service plan.
So let's say that you start getting a lot of traffic for your work
press side and my portfolio becomes extremely popular.
In that case, you can go ahead and add more instances,
which is what the Goodness App Services provides by default.
So you can say I can do scale either manual or rule based
and you can set up how many instances you want for your site.
You can do automatic ruby scaling.
So you can say, if I get more than 1000 requests, let me scale out.
You can even scale up.
So you can say, Oh, I'm
running on standard too, but that's no longer important for me.
I want to run on premium and you can scale up as well.
So everything which is available for App Service will work for you.
I know
another option that we have
is sometimes when you when you do the create over that,
we as I said, we go behind the scenes and we'll do a lot
of configuration for you, but you might later decide,
Oh, this is not what I wanted and I want to change my configuration.
So you can just go to your configuration tab, which is
just a bunch of environment variables that we automatically set for you.
And you can go ahead and change the environment variables
to see, to reflect the new settings.
So see how we had configured our blob container.
So it automatically created it said that your blob storage is enabled.
It gave you a container name.
So later on, if you want to change it
to something else, you have a different blob storage.
You can do that.
CDN is enabled
by default and it gives you the CDN endpoint.
Again, that's something that you can change.
Another thing which a lot of our customers have been asking for and they sometimes
want to change, is change the database host and database name.
So by default we've set up a database for you,
created the tables for you, but you might later on
have a different database you want to connect to.
So all you need to do is you need to come over here,
change your database host and your name, and of course your username password,
and that will automatically reconfigure your database to be using
whatever you want to use.
This is over here, your admin username and password.
So in case you want to go ahead and check what is the username password
in case you've forgotten what you said at the time of creation, you can do that.
You can rename it to whatever you want to.
Where can I learn more about getting started?
Where do I send my family and friends to get them up to speed on WordPress,
on App Service so we can.
So this is the quickstart that we have available for WordPress,
and this will tell you exactly how to get started.
What versions of PHP were running, what versions of my sequel.
We are running.
How can you change your different my sequel versions
you We also have this website which lists
all the various application settings that we have for WordPress.
So in case you want to manually play around with things,
you have a WordPress side which is reading a lot of content.
By default, we say that the start up time is 900,
but you might want to change it to something longer.
You can just do local cache.
So I just wanted to mention the local storage cache.
Local storage guys is interesting because by default for observers
we store everything in a storage account, but for performance reasons
it would be good to have the content locally on the van
and if you had the setting enabled in that case, your content is now.
So from the VM itself.
So you can get much faster speed than you would get
if you were doing the content from a storage account.
We also have things like the memory limit.
You can set up the memory limits for your WordPress site.
This would be useful in case because our VMs have fixed memory.
So which means that if you're going to run more than one WordPress site on a VM,
you might want to change the memory limits to see how much each side would take.
So you can go to these.
A lot of these are self explanatory, but you can go to these settings,
which is how you can customize your WordPress site.
Very cool.
I like that
you have made it really easy to get started, really easy for the basics,
but you've also got good, better, best where you can pick your performance.
And then for those that like to tweak
or those that are familiar with both WordPress and App Service,
I've got lots of options on how to make that happen.
This is a really exciting opportunity and I can now see why
there are thousands of new WordPress sites on Azure App Service every month.
Well, thank you so much for showing me this today.
Thank you, Scott, for having me.
This was fun.
I appreciate learning all about WordPress
on Azure App Service today on Azure Friday.
Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Azure Friday.
Now I need you to like it.
Comment on it, tell your friends retweeted.
Watch more Azure Friday.