I’m currently working on a project involving the Azure Germany ‘Sovereign Cloud’. Whilst it’s *mostly* the same as the global Azure offering, there are a few quirks. One of them I’ve found recently is the inability to set FTP deployment credentials on a Web App. I was needing to create some empty directories in the web app to support virtual directories I wanted to deploy into:

However, when you try and set an FTP username in the portal, you’ll get:

If you examined the network trace you’ll actually notice that the ajax call to check the FTP username is returning an error:

{“error”:{“code”:”InvalidResourceType”,”message”:”The resource type could not be found in the namespace ‘Microsoft.Web’ for api version ‘2015-08-01’.”}}

What to do?

MS Support kindly pointed me to a few articles regarding quirks in Sovereign Cloud web app deployments –

• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/benjaminperkins/2017/01/09/cannot-publish-to-soveriegn-cloud/ 
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/benjaminperkins/2017/01/09/how-to-kudu-using-your-publishing-profile/
• https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/benjaminperkins/2017/01/09/using-cloud-explorer-with-a-sovereign-cloud/

…which got me thinking, there are alternatives – namely using the Kudu tools:

• Open the site in Kudu (https://yourdomain.scm.azurewebsites.de)
• Click ‘Debug Console’, then ‘CMD’ (or PowerShell if you prefer)
• Use good old fashioned commands to manage your directory structure (or there’s also a simple GUI there to use too):
  

Won’t get around all the reasons for needing FTP – but might help you get over a little hurdle…

davros.