Tag: DevOps
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Deploy Unicorn serialization to XM Cloud using IAR – A proof of concept
Sitecore has been pretty clear that the only supported option for deploying items to XM Cloud was using Sitecore Content Serialization (SCS) format. But people love using Unicorn and there were enough clues lying around that Unicorn might work? But I couldn’t be sure. To make my life as a…
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Sitecore XM Cloud and Vercel Deployment Protection
Recently, Vercel made Deployment Protection the default for all new projects in Vercel. This is great news! This means that all your deployments will automatically be able to be secured with authentication, passwords, or trusted IPs. However, your Sitecore XM Cloud build might not be set up yet to work…
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How do I get a notification when my Vercel deployment fails?
My team was working on a project together and getting lots of ‘bot’ emails from our GitHub integration to Vercel. At least, we were getting emails when the build and deploy succeeded to Vercel. But what about when the deployment fails? Everything looked fine locally, the site was working, but…
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Should I #DockerAllTheThings?
A while back I was in a discussion about whether there was a benefit for all organizations to adopt Docker. I was of the opinion that there are scenarios where it just wasn’t a fit. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the benefits are always…
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Should we host Sitecore on IaaS or PaaS? (Jan 2020)
This started as a question on the community forums, and my answer got so long I decided to capture it here as well. In general, when you are choosing an infrastructure model the first question you need to ask is what your team is comfortable having responsibility over, and what…
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Sitecore Symposium 2019 – So you think you can DevOps?
This year at Sitecore Symposium we launched a new DevOps track, with two rooms of sessions delivering what you need for day-to-day tactical solutions, but also bigger-picture, strategic guidance. Do you want to know how to deploy your code with Azure DevOps? We got you covered. Or maybe you are…
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Continuous Improvement for Sitecore DevOps
Did you miss out on my Montreal SUG presentation a few weeks back? Not to worry, I got your back! I recorded a run-through of my presentation and uploaded it so you can hear my thoughts on how we can continuously improve and invest in DevOps practices for our Sitecore…
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Managing feature flags with LaunchDarkly
I had the chance to work the Sitecore booth at MSBuild in Seattle last week and took the opportunity to walk around and meet some of the other partners in the Hub. A lot of folks are doing cool things, but one that caught my eye was the work being done…
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Eleventh day of Christmas… Blogs A-Plenty!
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… eleven re-blogged posts! …ten women of Sitecore, nine sessions of training, eight tweets a-tweeting, seven VSTS features, six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. As a fun twist, each post has…
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Third day of Christmas… Maturity Models!
On the third day of Christmas my true blog gave to me… three maturity models! .. two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Customer Experience Maturity Model Sitecore released a maturity model a while back to guide organizations through the various stages of engaging a customer. Great for seeing…
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Sitecore Production Deployments: The Big Bad Wolf
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! Do you need to secure 14 signatures and present technical documentation just to run a script on your production database? Does it take a group of enterprise…
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Continuous Everything: The Art of Repetition
It is very fashionable to apply a single word to pretty much ANYTHING to try to get in on the latest trend. The current ‘Whatever-Ops’ trend (MarketingOps, ChatOps, OpsOps) is one such example. For a while, though, we’ve been having the word ‘Continuous’ thrown in front of a whole lot…
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TeamCity FTP plugin 501 error: Cannot accept argument
While investigating options for deploying Sitecore to Azure, I found a TeamCity deploy plugin that supported FTP (among other things). Unfortunately, after trying to get it up and running I ran into the following 501 error while using FTPES (explicit FTPS): “Failed to upload artifacts via FTP. Reply was: 501…
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Sitecore DevOps: Deploying instance role configurations with solution
Those of you who have installed Sitecore in a scaled environment (i.e. multiple instances) know that the process can be somewhat tedious. To configure an instance to use a specific role, you need to manually enable/disable/modify config files to make the instance act as a delivery, authoring, or processing instance. Oh, do…
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Fifth Day of Christmas… Five Golden Rules
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Today I offer you some best DevOps practices for your delivery team. Do, or do not. There is no…
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Can I have my DevOps Fluffy with a side of Culture?
Wednesday afternoon, while at the DevOps East Conference, I attended a Continuous Integration (CI) session delivered by Chris Riley (@HoardingInfo). Chris was sharing his past experiences with CI and how to best roll it out to all types of organizations. I particularly liked his suggestion of putting the QA team front and center,…
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Sitecore DevOps: Scaling content deployments
When a solution is in operational support, handling ongoing changes in the Sitecore database can be challenging. System admins and content marketers need to be able to make changes in production authoring, the maintenance team needs to make quick fixes through all environments, and the development team needs to be…
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Automate your server updates with OPAS and get some sleep at night
This week I got to see a demo of Infront’s Orchestrated Patch Automation Solution (OPAS). The software promises to automate away all the manual steps that operational staff need to perform to update servers and then validate that they are healthy after the update. This could put an end to…
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4 metrics to measure DevOps improvements
This week I wrote on the Nonlinear Digital blog a piece on DevOps metrics. The goal was to give organization’s 4 easy metrics that they can track to see whether or not the changes they are making to their tools and processes are improving their overall flow through development and operations…
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Why is DevOps so hard?
With agile development teams delivering potentially shippable software every few weeks, organizations struggle with the need to efficiently transition requirements, source code, and deployment steps from the development team to the operations team. Traditional documentation-oriented mechanisms cannot be efficiently kept up to date due to the ever-shifting nature of continuously evolving…
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Git branching model
I haven’t really had the chance to work with Git much over the years, other than creating a GitHub account and performing some simple merges on my own projects. For work reasons, however, I’ve been looking into sustainable models for using Git as an enterprise source control for larger, long-running…
St-Cyr Thoughts 