Case Study: Umbraco achieves rapid provisioning and elastic scaling for thousands of tenants with Microsoft Azure

Umbraco uses Azure SQL Database to quickly provision and scale services for thousands of tenants in the cloud

Umbraco, the popular open-source CMS, needed a way to offer a hosted SaaS (Umbraco-as-a-Service) that simplified customer deployments, eliminated infrastructure management, and scaled cost‑effectively for thousands of tenants. The company’s challenge was to provide near‑real‑time provisioning and elastic performance without over‑provisioning capacity or hiring database administrators.

Umbraco built UaaS on Microsoft Azure using Azure SQL Database elastic pools, pre‑provisioned databases, and automated provisioning via C# management libraries and Azure Service Bus. The result: customers can spin up CMS environments in seconds, Umbraco runs nearly 3,000 databases across 19 pools with automatic scaling to handle peaks (e.g., 100 DTUs), and the service is growing by about 30 new customers per day while keeping utilization high and management overhead low.

Umbraco

Morten Christensen

Technical Lead