Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
If you're reading this soon after I post it then it's very nearly the end of the "grace period" where anyone can run Docker Desktop. As of 1st February if your business meets certain requirements you have to pay for each user. So what can us Sitecore devs do if we aren't in a position to pay that fee? Well the good news is you can run Docker without the Desktop bit, and it's not too tricky once you wrap your head around a few things...
I spent some time working with a colleague who couldn't get his docker instance to start up happily this week. And it's reminded me that for all its positives, there are still some challenges with understanding the underlying issues when a developer container instance breaks. I realised I need a "go read this" post for the start of future discussions like this, so here are some problems you might see, and some diagnostic suggestions I wanted a convenient way to share:
I've had some conversations recently about odd issues with search-driven sites, whose root cause was related to disaster recovery patterns. While it's important to make sure that your business-critical website has a good backup and recovery process in place, it's also important to pay attention to how to correctly configure these scenarios...
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.
There was a lot of interesting information releases during Sitecore Symposium**1 last week. Since I had to summarise this for a work event, I figured I should reuse those thoughts, and write up a brief summary of some of the announcements that caught my attention, and (importantly) Sitecore's vision their future SaaS product:
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.
