Kentico and Microsoft Azure: Hustle and flow

Let it grow

First of all, both Kentico and Azure have scalability in common, which is crucial. Just as Kentico has a range of features designed to grow with an organisation from basic content management right the way up to complex integrations and data insight, the beauty of the cloud is that it can just keep expanding to accommodate that growth. In fact, the cloud is less akin to server hosting than it is to a vast, accessible infrastructure. It’s a whole ecosystem of servers and networks that function together. And with the strength of Microsoft behind it, Azure is continually investing in improvements that fuel even greater stability.

Azure helps Kentico to help you

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an area of special interest to Microsoft at the moment in the context of Azure. For the conspiracy-minded, don’t get too queasy. This AI is relieving marketing drudgery jobs like asset tagging and media descriptions that eat up overheads. Getting these tasks done and done correctly is important for SEO and site accessibility, and Azure AI works smoothly with Kentico to automate them. Just the sort of AI helping hand to make life a bit easier, and maybe more profitable.

Let Azure do the heavy lifting

But perhaps one of the most important enhancements that Azure brings to Kentico is performance management. This is down to the sheer leverage of Azure’s vast server network, but also the power of Microsoft’s AI models. If you’ve got a lot of data to store and search, Azure offers several layers of data management to ensure efficient indexing, updating, and security. The benefits realised in Kentico are faceted navigation, automation in index updating, an automated retry policy for failed requests, and more.

Share the load

Additionally, Kentico clients can also avail themselves of Azure’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache webpages and other web assets in local nodes. That means far-flung users aren’t waiting ages to load your site. Likewise, Azure Pipelines gives you the potential for continuous app deployment, so your users are always viewing the most up-do-date version of your site. Azure also has robust load balancing facilities which are more than capable of handling major traffic influx events. This is a massive advantage that cloud hosting can have over traditional hosting.

For example, London Luton Airport, one of our own Kentico projects, is using Azure for load balancing. As a transport hub, it’s particularly open to high peaks in web traffic whenever there’s an outside event that comes into play, such as snowy weather or an airline going bust. By hosting redundant databases on Azure and utilising web apps, they keep information moving for their users.

So is Azure cloud hosting right for your Kentico project?

Have a chat with Technical Director Ben Franklin to find out more. enquiries@quba.co.uk | 0114 279 7779