Hi,
We're evaluating moving our hosting to the cloud, and what we've found is that our on-premises hosting is customized enough that it doesn't "fit" in either the Azure Cloud Services or Azure Web Sites hosting model. We are evaluating how we can re-architect things to support a fully-managed hosting environment like Azure Web Sites, but in the mean time, we're wondering if there is an intermediate step that gets us at least OS level management (e.g., automated installation of patches).
I see that if we opt for Azure Virtual Machines, then we are 100% responsible for OS level management. That means we need to apply any Microsoft patches that are released, ensure that log files don't exhaust our disk space, etc. Typical "care and feeding" of a Microsoft Windows server.
If possible, we would like to offload this so that, once we've got our server configured, we can turn the "care and feeding" over to an admin and all we have to worry about is deploying our files. As best I can tell, Microsoft does not offer a"server management" package through Azure. However, it occurred to me that there might be a Microsoft partner that will do server management. I've been searching and haven't been able to turn anything up--is there a marketplace where Microsoft partners offer services like this?
Thanks!
-Josh
-jb