As
DotNetNuke is based on .Net and as it has seen great improvements last year when it comes to “cloud“ DotNetNuke is kind of married with
Azure as a cloud platform. So far, so good. Go ahead and try it. It’s simple, powerful and … beautiful ;).
However, let me try to explain this. Perhaps you’ve heard that Azure is not the only cloud platform on the market ;). There are other big players offering their services on the cloud market. Let’s call them yellow. Yes you got that right: I am talking about Amazon.
So as Amazon (AWS) offers a lot Microsoft related
IaaS, you can easily run DotNetNuke on AWS. Storage, database services and Windows Servers (
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)) are offered. Just to name a few of their services. What’s offered by Amazon is simply easy to use and pay as you go infrastructure. A nightmare for every hosting company but a great playground for developers and customers!
However, since today it was never so easy to build your DotNetNuke playground. Just use a preconfigured AWS machine image.
At the end of this step by step tutorial, you will have a newly installed and preconfigured Windows Server 2012, IIS8, SQL Server Express 2012 (no user instance; integrated AppPool authentication) running DotNetNuke CE 7 on AWS. We will have all needed stuff on one machine, comparable to your existing Windows server. If you always wanted to run DNN on AWS: This is one pretty easy way to do it! Think about a test machine or a sample environment you need for one of your customers.
What we will do:
- Create an AWS machine (instance)
- Set security rules
- Run DotNetNuke
We will not use any other offered services like RDS (managed database service) as this is a beginner’s guide.
So, what do you need? Of yourse you need an amazon account. If you don’t have one … this must be your very first day on the internet. If that’s correct, no idea how you found this blog post! However, you better turn off your PC and enjoy life now. For all others having an amazon account already: let’s do it!
First, go to
console.aws.amazon.com and complete the registration process to enable AWS for your amazon account. If you have used AWS before: just login. At the landing page / dashboard, just click on EC2.
Now, on the EC2 Dashboard make sure to select the
AWS region US East (N. Virginia) in the upper right corner and then click on “launch instance”.
On the next screen just click on “continue”.
Now, switch to the “Community AMIs” tab and search for (guess what) “dotnetnuke”. The search is quit slowly. So be warned. If you selected (as mentioned above) the AWS
region
N. Virginia correctly you will find an AMI (Amazon Machine Image) as shown. It was preconfigured by myself: use it on your own risk (as always). As of today, you should only find one image containing the name “dotnetnuke” (ami-32cd5b5b; DotNetNuke CE 07.00.03). It contains everything you need. Go ahead and select it.
At the next step don’t forget to select your “Instance Type”. M1 will work great; a smaller one will do it, too. But don’t worry, you can change the instance type later if you want. Proceed for now.
At the next two screens, just click continue.
Now it’s time to give the instance a name.
And now, if you are new on AWS, you need to create a Key Pair to request the Windows Administrator password later. You need it if you want to connect to your sever using the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). If that’s not necessary for you and you only want to see DNN running on AWS (sometimes HTTP is enough) you could optionally also proceed without a Key Pair.
At the next step you need to set name and rules of the so called “Security Group”. This is a kind of firewall around each AWS instance or a group of instances. Type in a name, select and add the predefined rules HTTP, HTTPS and (if you want) RDP. You can change the rule set later.
That’s it. Launch now!
After you launched your instance … get a coffee … drink it. Take a long breath. What I’m trying to say here: Leave the instance some time to initialize. It needs to boot, configure and start all services. This may take about 4 to 5 minutes.
After you had your coffee, select the instance in the dashboard (you already did that, right!) and copy the URL to your clipboard … and open it in a new browser window.
Now, if you gave the instance enough time, the default DotNetNuke 7 installation will show up. If this doesn’t happen: time for coffee. And try again some minutes later.
Enter a host username and password. You don’t need to change the database information. Just keep it.
Done. Congrats.
As
you pay as long as your instance is running, you perhaps want to shut it down or even terminate it; or if you want to connect to the instance by RDP to see what you have done, you will need your Windows Administrator password. You will find all the needed functionality in the “Actions” menu.
So, what’s next: play around! And don’t forget to take a look at the brilliant
EC2 documentation.
Enjoy!
Cross-posted on ITM Labs