We want to run nop-commerce on azure. We have made seen the other posts on the forum, and through them have managed to get nop-commerce up and running on a single node on azure with little issue. However the other posts seem to neglect an important fact. nopcommerce is written to
a) write to the file system with details of which plugins are installed, e.g. when you install a plugin, it updates this file
b) once a plugin is loaded, it caches it settings in memory
Both of these issues are fine on a single node, but fall over when you have multiple nodes. Sure we can code around the issue that on Azure you can't write to the plugins installed file. The issue I mean is that nodes one and two will have plugin a, b and c installed, but then when via admin you install plugin d, your post to the admin app plugin config will go to a single node - this will then know about the plugin d whilst the other node will not. Similarly if you update the configuration for one of the plugins, this is stored in the db. However if node 1 has already loaded the plugin (and therefore its config), and you update the plugin config via admin and happen to post to node 2, node 1 will continue to use the old config values.
Now there are various ways around these issues.
For the first we are being pragmatic and deploying the InstalledPlugins.txt file with the app upon initial install. This way if we need a new plugin, we have to perform a new deploy of nopcommerce across all instances. However they are all always in sync.
Caching the config seems simplest to me right now for the second issue. I wonder if anyone has any views on this? Anyone else running nopcommerce on multiple nodes - not just azure but any multi node setup?
I hope that these notes help somebody, and thanks for any pointers anyone can provide re caching plugin settings
Chris