Sitefinity Azure Web App Auto Scaling – Admin back-end caching issue

Issue:

When hosting Sitefinity as a Web App in Azure editors are experiencing the following issues (or similar):

  • Editors cannot see updates from other users
  • Changes to content do not seem to persist. When making an update and saving and then returning to the content item the changes no longer appear.
  • Site sync results inconsistent – works at times but fails sometimes.

Solution:

When I encountered the above issues, the solution provided by Sitefinity support (to support multiple app instances/scaling) was to configure Azure Redis Cache. From the Sitefinity documentation:

When you upload your site on several instances in Azure or want to scale the instances, you need to prepare the communication infrastructure to transmit messages between the nodes. For example, to communicate cache invalidation. Sitefinity CMS uses Redis message sender that you must configure for NLB communication in Azure Web Apps.

https://www.progress.com/documentation/sitefinity-cms/configure-azure-redis-cache#provision-redis-server-in-azure

The instructions for configuration of Azure Redis cache can be found here:

https://www.progress.com/documentation/sitefinity-cms/configure-azure-redis-cache#provision-redis-server-in-azure

Before attempting to host Sitefinity as an Azure Web App, I highly recommend reading through all of their documentation carefully:

https://www.progress.com/documentation/sitefinity-cms/run-your-websites-on-azure-app-services