Interoperability of Public Clouds: Case of Azure and Joomla CMS Migration

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The features built in Azure for rapidly setting up and deploying various well-known CMS, collaboration, e-commerce and other  packages involving multiple components (application, database, web server etc) is really great. Work which could take many hours by IT specialists in the past can now be done in couple minutes by less advanced experts. However, what happens if a customer wants to migrate out a solution from Azure to another cloud or simply a Web hosting provider? The need might be there due to cheaper price of the services or other preferences. Would Azure allow you to migrate out the solution with similar speed and simplicity as when deploying? Here is a summary of hands-on experience in migrating out Joomla content management system from Azure to Web hosting provider which supports widely known industry tools in Web hosting mentioned in the article.

What is Joomla CMS?

For those who might not know, Joomla is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) for publishing Web content and widely used by content publishers and Web designers worldwide. For more technical folks - Joomla is written in PHP, uses object-oriented programming, stores data in a MySQL and includes many features such as page caching, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, search, and support for language internationalization.
According to Wikipedia, as of February 2014, Joomla has been downloaded over 50 million times. It is estimated to be the second most used content management system on the Internet after WordPress.

General Migration Steps for Joomla
To migrate Joomla from one server (this can be Azure service) to another (new Web hosting company) there are generally few steps as described fully here and summarized as follows.
1) Copying Application Files with FTP
- Download application files from server (Azure) to your computer.
- Upload application files from your computer to the new server
These operation often done by well known industry tools as FileZilla, Cute FTP used by Web masters and admins.
2) Copying the Database with phpMyAdmin
- Exporting a copy of the database (such as Azure service) to your computer
- Importing the copy into a new database
3) Changing Joomla Configuration to point to the new database etc.

Azure and Application Migration
The Microsoft's tool available in Azure for copying files is WebMatrix. In order to use it for accessing  files, a publisher settings file had to be imported. Using 3rd party FTP application was not possible or clear/straightforward due to this setup required. WebMatrix has a function to Download site (to local). However, it always got stuck without any message at the stage seen as in the below screenshot. Another option (besides file download) is to set up the whole environment for Joomla with installing MySQL DB, XAMP etc. locally. While this also did not work out to the fullest due to WebMatrix stopping execution, it somehow allowed to download the application files.

Azure and DB Migration

While database is a critical component of any CMS architecture, it is not directly available in Azure portal for any operations. The only link to it is under website settings as seen in the screenshot. If clicked, it brings you to 3rd party service called ClearDB and might raise at least couple of questions if not more. After some time of research you might end up installing one of the tools like  Oracle's MySQL Workbench, Sequel Pro for Mac OS X, or Navicat to access your database and copy it out locally from Azure and ClearDB framework. While Workbench did not work out well Navicat was a relatively short learning curve to get the job done and allows transactions between both Azure and the new hosting provider.

In Conclusion
While setting up CMS (such as Joomla) on Azure might take just minutes, migrating out is not so straight-forward and can take up to one day or more depending on the technical experience. If you are not sure about staying with Azure service forever, it might be wise for any organisation or individual to consider migrating out plan as well since Web site hosting market is very competitive with possibility of finding better value elsewhere.