How to Architect a high-performing and scalable Sitecore environment in the cloud

This is regarding attended webinar "How to Architect a High-Performing and Scalable Sitecore Environment in the Cloud" by Torry Williams, Senior Cloud Architect.

Below are the points covered by speaker.

Sitecore Development Options

-      Physical Servers

• Good for : hybrid environments, database workloads
• Dedicated resources built for unique environment

-      Public Cloud

• Good for smaller, separated Sitecore roles
• Cost effective & scalable

-      Private Cloud

• Good for security conscious virtual SC deployments
• Secure & efficient

-      AWS/Azure

•  Good for: clients wanting yo move to hyper scale public cloud
• Sitecore design & management expertise applied to AWS/Azure infrastructure

-      Colocation

• Good for those who prefer to managing the environment
• Client responsible of server configuration, proactive support and continuous business planning

According to Torry - Hybrid combination is the best.

What is scaling?

The ability of system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work.

There are two types of scaling

·         Horizontal scaling: adding or removing compute nodes

o    Example-Admission time in college, xMas, new year, Offer period, Holiday time etc. increase the traffic on website.

·         Vertical Scaling : adding or removing resources from a single node

Sitecore working depend upon its server roles and each role can be configured individually on distributed basis such as we can have different server for CD, session, collection, reporting, CM etc.

We can increase or decrease configuration of any particular role depend upon its usage

Example :-

If your management want daily or hourly reports, then you need to increase processing/aggregation role.

If there are 50 Content Editor, then you have to increase CM role.

If you have very heavy visitors traffic, you have to increase CD roles.

You can combine two roles but over the time period when user grow or more traffic, you may need separate it out.

Understand business requirement

•  Define success
• What problems are we trying to solve
• How is sitecore being used to solve them?
• Who are internal users - Marketing, sales, accounting, Management (etc.) 

              ·         How is Sitecore being used by each department? 
              ·         How often is reporting data required?

Understand The environment

•  Questions to size your cloud environment
• What SItecore version and modules are you running/considering?
• Are you utilizing a CDN?
• Are you utilizing a search service like solar or Lucene
• What is your tolerance for downtime? (HA - High Availability / DR)
• Number of contacts in your xDB?
• Request per second?
• Average page view per session?
• Session duration in seconds?
• Session end overhead?
• Estimated session size?

Session and collection DB are heart of Sitecore experience.

Use MongoDB for Session State instead of SQL server because of its ability to handle large amount of users and data.

Session can be of two type - Shared or private. If you have multiple CD then go for Shared Session state.

Always keep auto scale server configuration, in case if you need more server resources you can upgrade them anytime.

You can setup your CD/CM environment with single CD server, Single Load-Balanced CD server, Two Load-Balanced CD server.

You should choose cloud environment for deploying your Sitecore solutions. 

Why Cloud

• Simplified installation & configuration
• No specialist knowledge needed
• Global distributed data centers
• Automatic backup
• No need to manage scalability
• Security - spread across multiple locations

 Please leave your comments or share these tips if it’s useful for you.