Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
One of the recurring themes of deploying Sitecore over the last few years has been "how do I deal with Solr?". It's a question with many valid answers... I've been doing some research for a client recently, because they wanted to run their own SolrCloud instances in Kubernetes - and I came across the Apache Foundation's "Solr Operator" project. It's an interesting shortcut to efficient containerised deployments of Solr, and it might help you too...
I was asked to enable Sitecore's ItemService endpoints on a containerised instance of Sitecore recently, and my first pass through this didn't work. Turns out there's a key bit of documentation that seems to be missing for this scenario. Hence a quick post to help get info into Google. So if you need to do this, read on:
Some time back, when I was looking at how to release containerised Sitecore into Azure Kubernetes Clusters, I worked through the question of "how do I make DevOps wait for the new images to be deployed", because you might want to run further work after the new containers are spun up. While what I tried back then was mostly working, I've found some reasons to try a different tack since then.
Deploying Sitecore (or anything else) in containers has been a big learning curve for me. Every so often I come across a new aspect of the whole business that I've not seen before. This week, another agency's work showed me a new thing which might help with making changes to Kubernetes config. The approaches I'd seen to deployments involved pushing all of the Kubernetes config each time you want to release, but it turns out you may not need to do that...
I've been slowly improving the release process for the container-based project I'm working on. There's a lot to learn about the ways to configure the Azure Devops pipelines for this work, because targeting Kubernetes is quite different from the old IaaS and PaaS approaches I was used to.
Before Christmas I was working out how to spin up custom Sitecore images in AKS. Since I'm fairly new to containers generally and this was my first time running them remotely, I messed up. A lot. So I spent quite a bit of time trying to work out what it was I'd messed up. I found these commands particularly useful to work out what was wrong:
I've been working on a deployment of Sitecore using containers recently, and hit a scenario which isn't discussed much in the Microsoft documentation: How do you go about setting it all up if you can't use Active Directory accounts across your DevOps and Azure instances? Having done some digging, here's what I've learned so far:
Last time out I was thinking about some choices around setting up Sitecore in Kubernetes. Since then, I've moved onto the more practical task of trying to get the setup to work. And I doubt you'll be surprised to hear that I've met a few new issues... Maybe they'll help you save yourself a bit of time and frustration?
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:
