Month: April 2020

Deploying to Sitecore Managed Cloud

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

As part of of Sitecore Managed Cloud blog series this my last blog for how to deploy to Sitecore Managed Cloud.

Without any further delay I will start with option which we have to deploy to SMC.

  1. Sitecore Azure Toolkit (SAT).
  2. Use Azure DevOps with TDS and Razl.

Sitecore Azure Toolkit (SAT):

To deploy your Sitecore solution onto Microsoft Azure®. The Sitecore Azure Toolkit simplifies the task of preparing and deploying a Sitecore solution with:

  • PowerShell commandlets to package a Sitecore instance into role-specific packages.
  • Default integration with Microsoft Azure services: Microsoft Azure SQL®, Microsoft Azure Redis Cache, Microsoft Application Insights®, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search®.
  • Prebuilt ARM templates for frequently used topologies: XM, XP, XPSingle.
  • Configuration tweaks to run Sitecore on the Azure App Service.
  • Security features: HTTPS, low-privileged SQL access, secure Sitecore password.

Click here for more documentation for  getting started with Sitecore Azure Toolkit.

Use Azure DevOps with TDS and Razl:

There is another way which can be used is Configuring CI-CD pipelines in Azure DevOps by Using TDS web deploy packages. And for migrating the database use a Razl for first time. Let me explain this to you steps by step.

  1. Once you get SMC environments to use, you need to raise a ticket to Sitecore support for providing a services contract details for Azure DevOps which you are using.
  2. Once you get those details you need to configure that in your Azure DevOps account.
  3. Once Above is done you can use TDS to build and create web deploy packages pipeline.
  4. Once build pipeline is created then you can go further and create a release pipeline for the same.
  5. Now once entire setup is done you can have two option for getting your content (Sitecore data) migrated. The simple way is to sync everything to TDS and deploy, and the best way(recommended) is that use Razl to Sync all data for first time and then in subsequent release sync only required Sitecore data to TDS.

Summary: I found two ways to deploy the solution on SMC, but there are many different ways to do this. Please let me know in comment the other ways you guys used for deploying Sitecore on SMC.

Note: For using Razl please click here for link where great way described by Jon Jones.

Happy Learning!!!!

Advertisement

Capacity Management in Sitecore Managed Cloud

~ Nikhil Kulkarni ~ Leave a comment

Hi Champs,

As out Sitecore Managed Cloud, series is going on. So I decided to get you guys a new informative blog for Capacity Management in Sitecore Managed Cloud and, without any due we will start this.

Following are some point which you as Customer or Partner needs to take care of in case of Capacity Management or Sizing in SMC.

  • Budget.
  • The size of your Content database
  • The size of your xDB database
  • Cache sizing
  • Your Search Engine implementation plan
  • Your disaster recovery plan
  • Your RPO and RTO in the event of an outage
  • Any Previous sizing references.

Role of Customer/Partner:

As a Customer or Partner, you can also share more and more analytics reports of your exiting application or forecast analysis of users and their behavior and application requirements with respect to infrastructure in Azure. As all this information will give the technical team a way to design a constructive way to implement your needs. 

You also need to specify special needs like if you want to integrate some services for log management(Sumo Logic), APMT(New Relic). because these can take extra storage, app services or databases.

Role of Sitecore Team:

Once you as Customer or Partner provides some prerequisite information from above at the time of availing this service, Sitecore Cloud Ops team will choose the tier accordingly and then give you vanilla instances of SMC. Once that is done then according to your Capacity plan which will be based on the rest of the remaining above point will be executed jointly as per roles and responsibilities decided.

Note: You always have to scale your capacities as all this is Azure PaaS based.

Happy Learning!!!!