I’m currently working on s project that doubles down on serverless computing and consumption-based services in general. When it comes to serverless, usually, the first two things that come to mind are AWS Lambda and serverless framework (they nicely capitalize on the similarity of the approach with the product). They nicely play together and we use both, so as other AWS platform services.
When it comes to DevOps, we decided to go with CodeBuild as it can nicely be provisioned as a part of your core infrastructure....
I believe that everyone, who installed Sitecore Azure PaaS had their silent question moment: “Where are all my logs, and how I suppose to monitor this?”. While the first question was answered multiple times (e.g. on StackOverflow), the second part is a bit more complex.
You might think about what complexity I’m talking about? Yeah, putting Application insight Key is a no-brainer but it is far from enough to get observability of your system....
if you generating SCWDP packages for Sitecore you might get stuck at some point with a page saying *“Stay Tuned. We are updating…” *after deployment. This is what it means… Why The page is generated by a Sitecore utility called bootloader (Sitecore.Cloud.Integration.Bootload), which is a part of Azure Toolkit. This utility is responsible for the installation of other modules and the execution of post-build steps like configuration transforms.
The content of a page is coming from the App_Offline file, which is place at the root of your web app and prevents requests from hitting any login in it....
It’s been a few months since I’ve published Packertemplates for Sitecore. Their main purpose is to create Virtual Box images with a fully configured Sitecore instance. So far I have both updates for Sitecore 9.0 CMS and Sitecore Commerce 9.0.1 scripted there.
Recently one of my colleagues was tasked with the configuration of a standalone commerce server in a private cloud. ARM templates weren’t really useful there and we are too lazy to install everything manually....
It was not long ago when you need to mention Docker at least once during your presentation to make it cool and trendy. And actually, there is a good reason for that. Containerization provides a way to make environments portable and immutable. Immutable infrastructure for Sitecore would be much desired, but containers are on Windows are not so cool yet. It doesn’t mean that you cannot get it but we will need to bake it a bit differently....
A big portion of last year I’ve spent building accelerators for a Sitecore solution scaffolding and deployments aside from production projects. All this work was done for VMs created in a cloud managed via OpenStack. Using PowerShell DSC we were able to easily set up single machine local sandboxes as well as multi-server environments. However, provisioning VM and then configuring them is still less than ideal for the deployment of an application....
I’ve been working a lot on Sitecore development infrastructure recently and package management is one of the areas, particularly NuGet.
Unfortunately, Sitecore doesn’t provide any feed that you could use right away. so carrying over Sitecore DLLs in a repository is a standard practice that I’ve seen for few years and have actually been using.
So I decided to create my packages and here how I did it.
Versioning My goal was to create versioned packages for every version starting from 8....
It is a quite common situation when you need to prepare multiple Sitecore servers with different roles. If you take a look Sitecore documentation you will find a huge amount of tables with configuration files that need to be enabled/disabled.
Going manually through all of them isn’t the most fun task you could do, so I prefer to do this only once. Don’t repeat yourself :)
Also, this would be needed for an environment automation work I’m involved in, but this would be a separate set of posts....
It is not always possible to find enough time to play with your free-time projects and sometimes it might take more than a week after you created an environment and you started using it. And during this week you could forget something, e.g. password for your SSH connection :)
This is exactly what happened to me this weekend when I returned to my Sitecore development VMs with xDB and SOLR in Azure....