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...
For the moment Sitecore don't support Windows 11 for installing XM or XP - but since Microsoft have a fairly agressive policy of rolling it out to machines currently running Windows 10 and installing it by default on new hardware, there are a fair few developers out there finding themselves having to work out how to get it to work...
I hit a rather confusing issue with a release a while back, which initially appeared to be a Unicorn problem. But after investigating the details, I think this was actually an infrastructure problem causing some odd behaviour. I doubt this is a common problem, but still worth writing down in case it's a challenge for anyone else...
I wasn't at SUGCON this year, but I was watching the Twitter reactions, and I've chatted to a few community people about what was said at the event. And in amongst all the exiting technical stuff about XM Cloud, I think there's one slide which really stands out to me...
I've started looking at the details of the Headless Services GraphQL endpoints in Sitecore recently. And as part of this research, I got a bit confused trying to test queries in the Sitecore UI. I've worked out what was up, but maybe others will find themselves in a similar situation, so:
I came across an interesting issue generating a Sitecore Package recently. Googling the issue didn't give me the whole answer, so it's time to enhance the internet again with a explanation of what I saw and why I think it happened...
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...
