Kubernetes and Sitecore: Some questions I’ve been pondering…

I’m in the middle of trying to plan out the transition of a Sitecore 10 development project from PaaS deployments, over to the Azure Kubernetes Service. There’s some great info out there, but there have also been some interesting things I’ve wondered about that seem less documented right now. So here are some things I’ve learned this week:

Deploying Dianoga in developer containers

I bumped into an interesting issue recently, which I though others might come across. Trying to run a project with Dianoga in it didn’t work properly in a developer’s Docker container – it kept failing whenever it was asked to process an SVG image. Why didn’t that work? Here’s why:

Experimenting with Content Hub integration

I’ve got a project on the cards where I need to connect both Sitecore and a third-party image capture system to Content Hub. While I’ve done the official admin & developer training for Content Hub, I thought it would be worth a quick proof-of-concept so that I could verify the plan I had would actually work – and it turned out that there was an interesting issue hiding under this…

It’s nearly Symposium time!

It’s October – which means we’ve only got a few weeks until this year’s Sitecore Symposium. Are you signed up? I am, and here are some of my reasons why:

Watch your Blobs when upgrading to v9.3

I’ve been spending a bit of time helping out a client who’s working through an upgrade project recently, and the work to move from v9.1 to v9.3 raised an interesting issue I wasn’t aware of. So in the spirit of making life easier for others, here’s what happened:

Sitecore snuck in Content Security Policy!

Ages ago I wrote up a bit about how your public sites should consider implementing Content Security Policy because of all the hacks it can prevent. In a bit of frustrating irony, I was tripped up by a problem caused precisely because Sitecore have added some CSP headers to their own code. Google came up empty on this, so I’m documenting it for the next person who gets bitten.

SolrCloud with Sitecore 10

A while back I wrote about some initial investigations I’d made towards having SolrCloud in a containerised Sitecore instance. Since I worked on that, Sitecore have shipped their “official” container approach, so I’ve revisited my experiments using the examples Sitecore provides.

What’s interested me in Sitecore’s use of Docker

Now that Sitecore 10 is out, I’ve been having a dig into the new Docker approach that’s been released. There are some interesting differences here between Sitecore’s official approach and the way the community scripts I’d experimented with worked – and I’ve learned a few interesting new things as a result of having a read of the examples provided. Here are the things that caught my attention:

Experimenting with a SolrCloud container for Sitecore

I’ve got a project on the cards that I’d like to use docker containers for, but we’re talking about using SolrCloud for search. Right now, there isn’t a SolrCloud container in the Sitecore community container repo. So I started thinking about what would it take to make one.

Thinking about importing content?

We spend a lot of time worrying about the marketing content, and the general website text and images in Sitecore. A lot gets said about patterns for organising that content. But some projects have information that comes from external systems that needs to be rendered on the website. And plenty of sites choose to integrate that into their main content tree. Over the years I’ve bumped into a few problems because of this – usually because I find myself supporting something where poor decisions were made early in the design process for the integration. So here’s some things to think carefully about if you’re planning work that relies on back-end data: