Why Azure and Xperience by Kentico Belong Together

Xperience by Kentico is a modern digital experience platform (DXP) built on the Microsoft stack: ASP.NET Core, SQL Server, and cloud-native APIs. That makes Microsoft Azure the natural cloud platform for Kentico deployments. But simply lifting and shifting a Kentico solution to a virtual machine misses the point.

The real value comes from combining Xperience by Kentico with Azure's managed services. These services reduce operational overhead, improve reliability, strengthen security, and enable marketing and IT teams to launch campaigns faster and continuously improve customer experiences.

1. Azure App Service

Azure App Service is the fastest way to run Xperience by Kentico websites without managing Windows Server or IIS. It supports .NET and ASP.NET Core, offers built-in auto-scaling, deployment slots, custom domains, managed TLS certificates, and CI/CD integration.

How to use it for Xperience by Kentico

• Deploy the live site and administration interface as separate App Services or combined under one plan.
• Use staging slots to test updates before swapping to production with zero downtime.
• Scale out automatically during campaign traffic spikes and scale in afterwards to control cost.

2. Azure SQL Database

Xperience by Kentico stores content, contacts, marketing data, and ecommerce orders in SQL Server. Azure SQL Database gives you a fully managed, always-patched SQL engine with automated backups, point-in-time restore, and intelligent performance tuning.

Key configuration tips

• Choose vCore or DTU purchasing models based on predictable vs. variable load.
• Use elastic pools when you run multiple environments (dev, test, staging, production) to share capacity.
• Enable geo-replication and failover groups for high-availability and disaster recovery.
• Turn on Advanced Threat Protection to detect SQL injection and anomalous access patterns.

3. Azure Cache for Redis

Caching is one of the cheapest ways to make a Kentico site feel faster. Azure Cache for Redis provides a distributed, low-latency cache that integrates naturally with ASP.NET Core output caching, session state, and custom application caches.

Common Xperience by Kentico use cases

• Store ASP.NET Core session state across multiple App Service instances.
• Cache frequently rendered page fragments and personalization data.
• Reduce load on Azure SQL Database by caching query results and lookup tables.

4. Azure Blob Storage + Azure CDN

Media files, page attachments, marketing assets, and generated PDFs can quickly outgrow local disk. Azure Blob Storage is cost-effective, durable object storage that integrates with Xperience by Kentico's media libraries and custom file providers.

Pair it with Azure CDN for global speed

• Store assets in Blob Storage and serve them through Azure CDN edge nodes.
• Offload bandwidth from App Service, improving page load times and lowering compute cost.
• Add cache rules for common image formats and versioned static files.

5. Azure Front Door & Application Gateway

Placing Azure Front Door in front of your Kentico sites provides a global entry point with Web Application Firewall (WAF), SSL termination, DDoS protection, and path-based routing. For single-region deployments, Azure Application Gateway offers similar layer-7 protection inside a virtual network.

What you gain

• Protect forms, login pages, and admin interfaces from common OWASP attacks.
• Route traffic to the nearest healthy region for global audiences.
• Enforce HTTPS and custom domains with managed certificates at the edge.

6. Azure Monitor & Application Insights

You cannot optimize what you cannot see. Azure Monitor collects logs and metrics from every Azure service, while Application Insights adds application performance monitoring (APM), distributed tracing, and user-flow analytics specifically for your Kentico application.

Start with these dashboards

• Request duration and failure rates for key page templates and APIs.
• SQL Database DTU or CPU utilization and slow-query logs.
• App Service memory and CPU trends during marketing campaigns.
• Availability tests for critical customer journeys such as checkout or form submission.

Application Insights turns reactive firefighting into proactive optimization by showing exactly where visitors slow down.

7. Azure Key Vault

Xperience by Kentico needs connection strings, API keys, SMTP credentials, and TLS certificates. Azure Key Vault stores these secrets centrally and lets you rotate them without redeploying code or touching configuration files.

Recommended approach

• Store SQL connection strings and third-party API keys in Key Vault secrets.
• Import TLS certificates and reference them directly from App Service.
• Use managed identities so App Service can read secrets without passwords in app settings.

Key Vault eliminates hardcoded secrets and gives you an audit trail every time a credential is read or rotated.

8. Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD)

Xperience by Kentico administrators, content editors, marketers, and extranet users all need secure access. Microsoft Entra ID enables single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication, and role-based access control that maps cleanly to Kentico roles and permissions.

Use cases

• SSO for the administration interface using corporate credentials.
• Conditional access policies that require MFA for admin accounts.
• Integrate with external identity providers when required.

Centralized identity means fewer forgotten passwords, easier offboarding, and stronger protection for your CMS administration.

9. Azure DevOps & CI/CD Pipelines

Releasing Kentico solutions manually is risky. Azure DevOps provides git repos, agile planning, and CI/CD pipelines that build, test, and deploy your Xperience by Kentico code to Azure App Service and SQL Database with repeatable automation.

A healthy pipeline looks like this

• Pull-request builds compile the solution and run automated tests.
• Deployment to staging runs database migrations and smoke tests.
• Production deployment uses slot swaps or blue-green releases with rollback on failure.
• Infrastructure is defined as code with ARM, Bicep, or Terraform.

Automated deployments reduce human error, shorten release cycles, and make campaign launches predictable.

10. Azure AI Search

Site search is often the weakest part of a digital experience. Azure AI Search indexes Kentico content and media, then adds faceting, synonyms, scoring profiles, and AI enrichment such as image tagging, entity recognition, and language understanding.

Ways to enhance Xperience by Kentico

• Replace built-in search with AI Search for relevance-tuned results across pages, products, and documents.
• Use Azure AI Language to extract sentiment, entities, and key phrases from form submissions.
• Add Azure AI Vision to generate alt text and searchable tags for media assets.

Intelligent search and AI enrichment turn a static content library into a dynamic, personalized discovery experience.

11. Azure Functions

Not every integration belongs inside the Kentico web application. Azure Functions lets you run small pieces of code in response to events — HTTP requests, queue messages, timers, or webhooks — without provisioning servers.

Typical Kentico scenarios

• Process marketing form submissions and push data to CRM or marketing automation platforms.
• Sync contacts, orders, or newsletter subscriptions with external systems.
• Run scheduled cleanup jobs or data imports on a timer trigger.
• Handle webhooks from payment providers or third-party APIs.

Functions keep your web tier lean while handling integrations and background tasks in a scalable, event-driven way.

12. Azure Backup & Site Recovery

Campaigns, ecommerce transactions, and customer data cannot afford long outages. Azure Backup protects files and databases, while Azure Site Recovery replicates workloads to a secondary Azure region for true disaster recovery.

Build a DR plan

• Back up App Service content, SQL Database, and Blob Storage media on separate schedules.
• Use geo-redundant storage (GRS) for backups and media.
• Document failover and failback runbooks, and test them quarterly.
• Combine SQL failover groups with Azure Front Door for automated regional failover.

Putting It Together: A Reference Architecture

The table below shows how these services fit together for a resilient, high-performance Xperience by Kentico deployment.