Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
My work on a container-based v10.0 project keeps raising interesting challenges – things that don’t work quite the same way in Docker or Kubernetes, compared to the old world of "bare metal" installs of Sitecore. Custom log files are an example here...
My QA team had a deployment issue recently, where Azure DevOps failed to successfully release to a couple of servers. The reason for the failure wasn't obvious to me immediately, so here's a quick write-up for Google, in the hope it saves some other people.
Sometimes you have a problem that you should absolutely have seen coming. The annual "the company's Sitecore license has expired" fun is very much one of those things. But I'd not thought about this in advance, and the license expired while I was on holiday this year. It caused my team a load of hassle... But I have a plan to avoid this pain in the future:
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:
A while back I got a support issue where a client's Content Editor was suddenly very broken. No UI – just a giant YSOD. It's turned out to be the sort of mistake which I could see happening to others, so here's some info on what happened and ways the problem can be resolved.
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.
One of the interesting things that's arrived with Sitecore v10.1 is a new approach to how items get updated when you change versions. This change is aimed at containerised deployments, and I'm in the middle of a containerised project. So I figured I should take a look...
An issue I've bumped into a number of times over the years, is that sometimes developers want to be able to look at the query that got generated when they did something with Sitecore's ContentSearch APIs. The traditional answer of "go look in the logs" is one way to deal with this, but some recent project work got me wondering if there were alternatives...
