Suggested Update to "Dedicated Resources" Cloud Documentation Page

[hfloyd]

What type of issue is it?

Discussion

What article/section is this about?

umbraco-cloud/build-and-customize-your-solution/set-up-your-project/project-settings/dedicated-resources.md

Describe the issue

A project I am working on is split between shared and dedicated (live is on dedicated) and we had a severe, ongoing deployment issue which prevented successful deployments from staging (on shared) to live (on dedicated). After a month of support communications, and escalations, the issue was finally resolved with the simple addition of a configuration file added to the root of the Git repository. If this is a standard "fix" which would prevent this issue for other Cloud sites, I'd suggest mention of the necessary addition of this file be added to the "Dedicated Resources" documentation page.

This is a slightly edited version of the support message we received, which could be the basis of the docs update:

In the root of the repository, add a "Directory.Build.props" file.
The content of this file should be:

<Project>
	<PropertyGroup Condition="'$(WEBSITE_SITE_NAME)' != ''">
		<UseSharedCompilation>false</UseSharedCompilation>
		<BuildInParallel>false</BuildInParallel>
		<RunAnalyzers>false</RunAnalyzers>
		<UseRazorBuildServer>false</UseRazorBuildServer>
		<MSBuildDisableNodeReuse>true</MSBuildDisableNodeReuse>
	</PropertyGroup>
</Project>

The Condition in the PropertyGroups is an environment variable which will be provided automatically when the build runs on a Cloud environment. This ensures that it is only set up when building on the cloud environment, and not when running locally.

Very generally put, the theory is that the issue is caused by how MSBuild performs parallel builds.

The issue is environment-specific, coupled with hardware differences between shared and dedicated hosting.
The suggestion provided above addresses that.

[sofietoft]

Hi @hfloyd !

Thanks for the suggestions and for providing the amount of details.
If this, as you say, a "standard fix", then it does make a lot of sense to have it documented.

I'll run it by our Cloud team to hear what they suggest!

[sofietoft]

Hi Heather,
Hope you had a great weekend.

I've chatted with our Cloud developers about this, and while they agree it would be great to have some general docs for this, the solution you've described needs a lot more testing and verifying before we can recommend it through our documentation.
They've ensured me that this is a task on their board, and we will eventually see this - or a similar - solution in the documentation.

I'll leave this issue open for now, in case someone runs into a similar issue and decides to come looking for answers here 🙏

Hope you understand!
And please let me know if you have further comments or questions.

[hfloyd]

Thanks, @sofietoft for the update. Sounds like a solid plan. I appreciate you leaving this open for now. Perhaps others with similar problems will stumble upon this, and give it a try - then the Cloud team will have the additional testers they need 😉