Sitefinity 4.0 and Cloud

Hi, 

I am just about to start a new commercial project it will include different types (roles) of users, a forum, a rating system, functionality to upload and download documents, images and videos.

I am considering Sitefinity because it would save us a lot of time since it already includes user administration as well as forum module and functionality to upload files.

The project will potentially have a lot of files and I would like to be able to utilise one of the cloud storage providers such as Amazon S3 or Azure Storage.

If I understand correctly currently files are stored in the database, this won’t really work for us we need to be able to store them somewhere else.

Is that something that can be done with Sitefinity? Hopefully with providers already included.

Also, would it be possible to run Sitefinity without the web server?

Thank you for your help.

A

Hello Andrew,

We have plans to add Amazon S3 and Azure Storage providers. Currently they are not implemented and our plans are to have them after Q2. Implementation of these providers is quite complex and there are many dependencies that we have to consider, because of the licensing model and code security checks.

You can run Sitefinity 4.0 by using our ProjectManager which has built-in Web server, IIS or Visual Studio web server.

All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Hey Ivan,
  So does this mean that it's difficult to have the Images\Documents libraries served up from a cloud provider, or an external DAM (I'll be needing to do this soon)

Steve

Hello Andrew,

Well, we could not say if it is difficult - it really depends on the developer's skills, but it certainly not something that is available out of the box. We will most probably add the out of the box support for this in Q2.

Hi, could you please point us in some direction on how to proceed with a custom cloud storage for library items? I mean, some sample code or any sort of documentation would help...

I'm not too comfortable in using azure after reading that the items in the storage are actually open to the public (see statement below):

Secured access is not supported by Sitefinity’s Windows Azure blob storage provider. All containers and blobs that it creates are public. Sitefinity’s view permissions are only applied to determine the visibility of links and thumbnails in the frontend widgets, but any of the blobs can be downloaded from Windows Azure servers using its public URL. The generation and usage of a shared access signature (SAS) for the front end pages of Sitefinity is not implemented. 

Just to share my findings, I've found some initial documentation about this: