How to: Battle-Proven, Scalable Architecture for Sitecore on Azure

Having a scalable and proven architecture for a Sitecore application and infrastructure environment is like building a sturdy, flexible bridge that can support heavy traffic and withstand harsh weather conditions.

The bridge's solid foundation and carefully designed structure ensure that it can handle increased traffic and weight without collapsing, while its flexible design allows for easy maintenance and updates. Similarly, a Sitecore environment with a scalable and proven architecture can handle increased traffic and data volumes without experiencing downtime or performance issues, and can adapt to changing business needs with minimal disruptions. 

Just as a bridge must undergo rigorous testing and inspections to ensure its safety and reliability, a Sitecore environment must be thoroughly tested and optimized to ensure its scalability and performance. 

Getting ahead of your Sitecore platform 

CIO’s, CMOs and Digital Teams that own a Sitecore implementation want to be seen as business enablers. This means ensuring flawless availability from an end-to-end optimized full-stack, and operating a secure and trusted platform for growth. These leaders increase the velocity of their teams to build iterative, quick results to win the dynamic world customer experience transformation.

But, many Sitecore Platform owners and their digital teams find it hard to get ahead of the platform. They have unreliable infrastructure that stifles innovation, and reckless releases that increase tech debt and cause digital teams to focus on maintaining the infrastructure rather than building valuable digital experiences. They spend too much of their time trying to figure out how to enable what should really be a commodity by doing it all themselves, which in the end is too costly, both in operational effort and lost opportunity.

To overcome these challenges, platform owners need flawless performance of their Sitecore DXP, driven by automation and specialist skills. This gives them the ability to make decisions with velocity because they have an operating environment they can trust.

So, how can a platform owner address their problem of unreliable infrastructure, and instead have flawless performance of their platform? It starts with a scalable and proven architecture.

Scalable & battle-proven architectures 

A proven architecture is one that has been tested and refined overtime. It considers how industry best practices intersect with the specific needs of the platform and uses real-world experience. Proven architecture is developed with a product mindset, using Platform Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering skills across the technology and the ongoing operating environment.

There are several facets to achieving a robust architecture, including security, infrastructure, release strategy, coding practices, maintenance, and monitoring. By implementing a battle-proven architecture that addresses these primary concerns, you can avoid common pitfalls that lead to website outages, slow release cadence, and hinder your ability to deliver digital experiences efficiently.

This approach will help ensure that your Sitecore platform is designed to provide the best possible digital experiences to your customers.

Scalability is equally as important.

Any enterprise website must grow with the business, with the ability to handle increasing traffic and data volume without sacrificing performance or reliability. A scalable architecture allows you to add new features and functionalities as needed, without disrupting existing processes or compromising the integrity of your platform or your code.

Hand-in-hand, a proven and scalable architecture helps your digital teams to optimize development efforts and reduce the time and resources required for ongoing maintenance and infrastructure management. Your team can perform reliable releases knowing there is a solid foundation for future upgrades and enhancements, making it easier to adapt to changing business needs and customer expectations.

Key challenges with your current architecture and supporting operations 

Operational Overhead

We work with many customers, and a key part of our process is an upfront detailed current state assessment. The common golden thread is that all teams indicate the operational overhead to maintain, support, release and deal with the platform significantly hampers their ability to deliver business value. 

Developers and Engineers spend too much time keeping the platform running smoothly. But, why?

The key driver is the lack of productized architecture that wraps the end-to-end ecosystem, with proven Infrastructure, DevOps, SecOps and PerfOps underpinned by focused Site Reliability Engineering. It’s incredibly hard to get this right.    

Poor performance

We see that platforms that don’t have a scalable and proven architecture don’t handle traffic spikes data processing. As a result, websites experience slow page load, errors, and outages – affecting customer experience of the end user at a time that usually matters most.

Security Vulnerabilities

Security should be a fundamental part of the platform, rather than an afterthought, and it should be driven by preventive measures rather than a reactive approach.

Just like the architecture itself, security must constantly evolve to address emerging threats. Our assessments always identify gaps, often resulting from the platform's architecture being established at a specific point in time without incorporating best practices and considering nuanced platform considerations.

Consequently, there is a lack of security evolution. While many customers consider regular penetration testing as the gold standard for security validation, in reality, it is just a small part of ensuring that your Sitecore platform is not vulnerable.

Limited functionality

One of the key selling points of any Sitecore platform is the access to many powerful digital marketing features and functionality that ensure your customers have a superior experience when engaging with your business.

When architectures are not battle-proven,  features are usually lacking, too. Because organisations can’t overcome the upgrade battle, they aren’t implementing new features into the platform and are struggling to see true return from their investment.

High maintenance costs

If every time code is released, the platform comes down – your digital team are spending their time putting out infrastructure fires rather than building digital experiences. This creates a never-ending tech debt that teams can’t jump over. The result is in-house infrastructure management that is time-consuming and costly, especially if the platform needs to be re-architected to accommodate new features or handle increased traffic.

How to achieve flawless performance of your Sitecore DXP

The Dataweavers WebOps Platform and WebOps for Composable Platform were created to help customers fully utilise and maximise the return on their Digital experience investment.   Using full automation and infrastructure as code to establish best practice Infrastructure, DevOps, SecOps and PerfOps, the platform delivers a Operational digital ecosystem – that is hands off for our customers and ‘just works’.

Our WebOps Platforms is the only technology platform available globally that encodes best practices in Sitecore performance, security, and reliability management into an automated solution, and in doing so it removes your dependence on people-based skills and manual processes. 

Understand how you can work towards flawless performance of your Sitecore architecture.

Download our Top 10 Checklist for a Proven, Scalable Architecture for Sitecore on Azure.