Category Sitecore

Sitecore is a Web Content and Digital Marketing Management System.

Should I #DockerAllTheThings?

Jason St-Cyr 3 Comments

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 there, but some organizations have some issues they have to work out first before they can start reaping those benefits.

When you start looking into containers and their benefits you may come to the conclusion that “this would not work here“. Maybe that’s right. Are you sure?

You need to ask yourself why that is. Why is it that your organization cannot benefit from container tech? Perhaps there’s an underlying issue that needs to be addressed first, like a lack of priority on infrastructure automation. Or a lack of a DevOps culture. Or any number of things. Ultimately, there is one thing I believe is true:

YOU. CAN. NOT. FIX. ORGANIZATION. ISSUES. WITH. TECHNOLOGY.

If you are struggling with your digital transformation, suddenly deciding to Kuberneti-All-The-Dockers is not going to solve that.

(I have decided that Kuberneti is the verb form)

I put together some key benefits of containers for organizations up on sitecore.com, as well as the challenges you might face and how to tackle them. Following this article (linked below) is a good series by my colleague Rob Earlam that can help you get started with Docker:

Are Docker and Kubernetes the right fit for my team?

How to decide if your organization should adopt a container strategy.

Read on sitecore.com

I’d love to hear back your thoughts on this and how I could make this better!

Should we host Sitecore on IaaS or PaaS? (Jan 2020)

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

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 your organization is willing to pay to have somebody else worry about. You could do it in-house, pay a managed services group or Sitecore partner, or have Sitecore do things for you. Figure out what your team wants to have responsibility for and then that will guide you towards the best hosting model for your production environment.

Continue reading “Should we host Sitecore on IaaS or PaaS? (Jan 2020)” →

Sitecore Symposium 2019 – So you think you can DevOps?

Jason St-Cyr 1 Comment

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 wondering how to fit an agile process into a waterfall organization? We got you there too! This track can appeal to both the technical and the business, it’s not all about Solr (though we got that too, thanks Jeremy!)

devops-memes-emcworld-2015-8-638

I am really proud of the sessions that Rob Earlam and I selected for the track this year, I think we have a little bit of something for everybody. Below, find your guide to all things DevOps at this year’s event!

Continue reading “Sitecore Symposium 2019 – So you think you can DevOps?” →

xConnect Upgrade to 9.2 – Where did the web request handlers go?

Jason St-Cyr Leave a comment

Recently, I needed to update my xConnect Tutorial from 9.0 to 9.2 so I could start looking at the new data purge API (more on that another day). I figured it should be an easy enough upgrade, my tutorial wasn’t doing anything complicated. Just some basic Create Contact or Register Interaction stuff.

So, I did the usual:

  1. Update Target Framework from 4.6.2 to 4.7.2
  2. Change all the NuGet references to the 9.2 packages
  3. Recompile
  4. Squint at all the red compile errors from doing an upgrade…

Continue reading “xConnect Upgrade to 9.2 – Where did the web request handlers go?” →

Are you ready for the MongoDB 3.4 EOL?

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If you are running Sitecore version 8.2.x, you are running MongoDB 3.4. Unfortunately, that also means you are impacted by the announcement by MongoDB that version 3.4 will reach end-of-life in January 2020.

You have some options on how you want to fix this and it sort of depends on how much tolerance your organization has for running production systems that don’t have commercial support from the vendor.

Over on the Sitecore Technical Marketing blog, I outlined a variety of options and provided a few FAQ answers:

 

Preparing for AI-driven customer experiences

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Digital marketers today are caught in the middle of a huge digital transition.

Behind them lie the old, slow, and manual methods of creating content, connecting with customers, tracking engagement, and measuring the results.

Ahead of them is the promise of the brave new intelligence-enabled world, teeming with possibilities—task automation, massive-scale analytics, and real-time, data-driven decision making powered by Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning solutions.

For the most part, these promises have been made in good faith. Connecting clean, structured, and tagged data with powerful machine learning algorithms is an exciting prospect brimming with interesting use cases like:

  • Automated content tagging
  • Self-assembling web pages
  • Dynamic audience discovery
  • Predictive scenarios and best next steps

However, for many, this bold new future of seemingly magical efficiencies might be further away than it seems. The industry is currently packed with pundits and vendors getting excited about what might be possible with AI without thinking about the steps needed to get there. While the benefits of becoming an AI-enabled marketer are clear, the journey a marketer and their team needs to take is still hazy.

Read more on sitecore.com

Preparing your CMS infrastructure for traffic spikes

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We’re living in the days of “going viral.” Consumers move faster than ever, and businesses need to be ready to respond to sudden demand the moment it arrives—or risk losing out to competitors.

The right endorsement from the right person can generate global exposure and cause unprecedented numbers of people to flock to your site, with little or no prior warning.

Take Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show in 2017—millions of people saw her backup dancers in Steve Madden boots and rushed online to order them. That can amount to more traffic than most people dream of in a year, all arriving in seconds.

Major televised events are only one piece of the puzzle. In the modern digital world, digital marketing is aimed purposefully at trying to create demand–and businesses need to be ready to scale up to meet sudden successes from the drop of a tweet.

Crucially, it’s not just about bearing the weight of enormous traffic spikes. It’s about being able to innovate, and capitalize on sudden demand at a moment’s notice. One great way to do that is to leverage cloud hosting for your CMS.

Read more on sitecore.com…

Mitigating CMS implementation risk

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Prior to joining Sitecore as a Technical Evangelist, I worked as a consultant on many projects implementing Sitecore in various types of scenarios. The implementation is where things can really start to heat up!

The stakes are high. More than that, implementation projects can also be long, costly, and susceptible to error, even with the best partner. No implementation project is exactly like another, so there is always an element of the unknown as you undertake this new project. Also, just like the selection process, these projects are highly visible to the rest of the business. That means risks need to be identified early and addressed as soon as possible.

Read more on sitecore.com…