PaaS to AKS: ARM for EDS

This blog post is part of a series about building a production ready Continuous Integration setup for Sitecore using K8s containers on AKS. For more information and other articles on this subject check out the series index. External Data Services A K8s deployment to AKS requires a number of so called external data services (EDS) …

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PaaS to AKS: scripts & secrets

This blog post is part of a series about building a production ready Continuous Integration setup for Sitecore using K8s containers on AKS. For more information and other articles on this subject check out the series index. Secrets management In general it is a bad idea to store credentials or secrets in your code repository. …

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From Sitecore PaaS to AKS – a series

From PaaS to AKS. Or actually, from running Sitecore on a full PaaS architecture using Web Apps, based on the Sitecore Azure Quickstart Templates (or my own ARM set derived from that), to a containerized Sitecore deployment using the Kubernetes specification files supplied by Sitecore, running on AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services). That’s the journey I …

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Where did our Search go?

Azure Search will break your Sitecore 8.2 website A few days ago, one of our Azure production environments running Sitecore suddenly stopped working. At first it seemed to be just a ‘regular’ hick up and Azure reported auto-recovery:

The unavailability was correct. But it didn’t recover as it should. And the remark that no …

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Azure Gateway for Sitecore

Strong ciphers & SSL termination without ASE Multiple recent pen tests have shown us that Azure Web Apps by default do not support the (strong) SSL ciphers we desire. Not willing to make the jump to the Application Service Environment (ASE) right away, we decided to try and secure our Web Apps using an Application …

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Sitecore Azure scripts update

My colleague Anton Kuryan revamped my Azure scripts, removing duplicate code and adding several new features. Check out https://github.com/robhabraken/Sitecore-Azure-Scripts for the latest version! One parameterized PowerShell script When I first wrote these scripts, I used the Sitecore templates as a starting point, creating multiple folders for the different setups single, double and full (referring to …

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Hot Swappin’

Deploy & swap your Sitecore Azure Web App without downtime This blog post is the product of my cooperation with Mark de Bruijne, senior lead developer at Colours. Mark extended my Azure ARM scripts with the optimizations shown below, based on his research to avoid downtime on swapping, and helped me tremendously with writing this …

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Azure templates update

Since we’re using ARM style provisioning and Sitecore deployments for a while now at Colours, it’s time for an update. First of all, because there were some changes per Sitecore 8.2 Update 3, and secondly, because we have improved our scripts and want to share a few learnings. Check out the new scripts and templates …

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Blue Green Sitecore Deployments on Azure

In my blog post and talks early december, I gave an extensive introduction on deploying and hosting your Sitecore solution on Azure Web Apps; right after the release of Sitecore 8.2 Update 1, which was the first Sitecore version to support Web Apps. Since then, a lot happened. Not only Sitecore released both Update 2 and …

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The Staging slot EventQueue issue

Say what? Having the possibility of using staging slots when moving from on premises to the Cloud was one of the most promising and convenient improvements that could enhance the stability and uptime of our applications. Very exciting! But soon we ran into an issue, both with Cloud Services as with Web Apps: Where we could replicate …

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