I moved our Plesk hosting from an 'On-Prem' Solution to the Azure Plesk Marketplace image. Our DB and Plesk images are separate and we use a single private subnet for the DB connection, allowing it to be contacted only via the Plesk VM. I have not seen 'any' latency issues.
I have found an issue and this may be present on non-'cloud' versions, well I didn't 'find' it, it appears it has been present for a while and I stumbled across it as I don't log in as root when running my backup scripts.
Issue:
- amend the vhosts directory permissions using FACL permissions.
- test working, yes confirmed.
- reboot the server
- All permissions are not completely wrong.
Using FACL permissions on other servers works fine, and I have never run into the issue. However when using FACL permissions on the CentOS 7 marketplace VM, it broke the VM and i had to restore it from the nightly backups.
Otherwise, ease of setup=perfect, costs=reasonable, maintenance costs=minimal, ease of use as I no longer need to order a separate Licence for Plesk=spot on.
@azzaka
I am happy to see that you moved some or more Plesk instances to Azure - that is or might be a good solution, even though the cost is relatively high and major drawbacks are present in terms of performance and throughput (and potentially egress and ingress costs).
Many years ago, I have tested Azure with
- a custom image, made from scratch and compared it to the default Marketplace images, (and)
- an experimental Plesk cluster setup, which cluster was very capable of running - simulated - high loads ........ but at a very high price (!),
and the above is one of the many tests that we executed in cloud environments.
I do want to point out that it is in your best interest to
a) create a custom image, hence also reverting to the Plesk one-license-per-server model : this custom image gives you more flexibility and efficiency in the long run, especially when customizing (reboot persistent!) configuration and configuring for enhanced security, (OR)
b) create a simple bash script allowing you to customize the configuration (in a non-reboot-persistent way) of the server : just run the script after allocating and launching the Azure VM, (OR)
c) advanced - create an Azure script that will run after allocation but before the VM is launched : not a topic for now ....
I also want to point out that any Azure VM based Plesk install is a bit different than a regular server based Plesk install - you should really adjust locations of the directories used to store configuration and temporary files, otherwise you can or will loose relevant/convenient data across reboots or VM reallocations.
In essence, put most data on a the shared drive associated with the Azure VM and make sure that the drive is a separate file share that can be assigned to other Azure VMs : no need to restore backups, just launch another VM and attach the file share.
Also note that this is the trick to load-balancing or clustering : two VMs using the same file share, it is possible (but not recommendable) and it will increase the availability of your cloud setup (with file shares already being replicated, so no need to setup RAID alike structures in Azure - just make snapshots!).
As you can imagine by now, many of the standard features of Plesk - like backup extensions or solutions - are completely obsolete when running in Azure.
You can use multiple file shares, snapshots and backups of the fileshares (with cold storage for backups), multiple VMs as proxies (with Nginx load-balancing), hence also removing the common limitations of both Plesk and Azure!
Nevertheless, there are some common issues that you have to be aware of and that you need to configure within Azure.
For instance, your private subnet is not so private and not secure ........ neither is the Plesk DB connection : there is no secure SQL support.
Please add some security measures to the (private) network, start with a NSG and add some paid-for Azure functions - otherwise, you will have a significant attack surface, even though one might expect that everything is safe.
I hope the above helps a bit ....... and please do keep posting about the experience with running Plesk in Azure!
Kind regards....