This here blog’s been living happily on a VM in the cloud for years with another VM hosting MySQL for it. They both required very little maintenance but I wanted them to require less so I figured why not fire up a simple hosted solution in Azure instead. So here goes let’s see how long that takes.
First I logged into the Azure portal, click the New button and search for WordPress which gives me a few choices from different publishers. You can see that I have a few options including hardened version from
Cognosys, a Docker container with MySQL included or a Multi-Tier install from the folks at Bitnami.
I’m just going to choose the standard install from WordPress and click then click Create.
This takes me to the form you see above where I can choose the name of my app the resource group (for organising my resources inside Azure) and a choice of Database Provider. Previously from here I’d have to specify a cloud host or an instance I’ve setup separately, but I’ve chosen the new MySQL in App (Preview) option. The description for that comes with a heavy caveat:
MySQL In App (Preview) runs a local MySQL instance with your app and shares resources from the App Service plan. Note that apps using MySQL In App are not intended for production environments, and they will not scale beyond a single instance.
But this blog is pretty low traffic and I like to live dangerously so I’m going to try it out and see how it performs. I click Create once more and Azure starts the deploying and since I’m British I make a cup of tea. A couple of minutes later I receive a ‘Deployment succeeded’ and I can see that my shiny new WordPress instance has been deployed.
And when I navigate to its URL, I hit the famous five-minute WordPress installation process.
