How to get predictable Sitecore Cost & Capacity

Having predictable cost and capacity in a Sitecore application and infrastructure environment is like driving on a well-maintained highway with clear signs and no unexpected detours. You know exactly how much fuel you'll need to reach your destination and you can plan your journey accordingly. You don't have to worry about sudden roadblocks or construction work that could delay your arrival or force you to take a longer route.

If there is a pothole that appears on the road, you don’t have to get out of your car to fill it. A person in high-vis gear, who is an absolute expert, will get it fixed for you. Instead, you can focus on enjoying driving and reaching your destination on time and within budget.

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, as a platform owner, how can you:

• Focus on strategic business value
• Minimize risk
• Optimize performance
• Maximize platform value, and
• Provide certainty and peace of mind?

One of the key elements is having predictable cost and capacity of the platform.  

Why do you need predictable cost & capacity?

It’s no secret that the ability to predict costs in any organisation – big or small - is the silver bullet for budgeting and planning the future growth of the business. This is especially true when it comes to enterprise MarTech licences like Sitecore, and the costs to keep the platform maintained over time.

By fixing the costs to maintain and keep their platform up-to-date, digital teams will avoid unexpected expenses & cost overruns, while helping to appropriately allocate resources to activities that drive revenue, rather than simply ‘keeping the lights on’.

While the benefits of predictable costs are clear, the ability to scale capacity based on point-in-time requirements is equally important. 

Predictable capacity ensures platform owners can handle both expected and unexpected level of traffic and resulting cloud spend to handle load changes quickly. Defined capacity parameters will help digital teams and platform owners avoid issues resulting from unexpected spikes in traffic or performance problems from insufficient resources – ultimately delivering a consistent and reliable experience for customers.

Ensuring predictable capacity goes beyond the implementation of a hosted solution; it extends to the team responsible for its maintenance. However, organizations often overlook the significance of having a capable maintenance team equipped with the right tools, approach, and skills to handle both day-to-day business operations and exceptional circumstances. The cost and capacity implications of this aspect are often underestimated.

Well-managed platforms address this by establishing robust teams that incorporate the principles of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). Unfortunately, many organizations are currently understaffed in this area and lack visibility into the amount of time dedicated by valuable team members to ensuring platform reliability and uptime.

Challenges faced by organizations when trying to predict Sitecore cost & capacity 

Budget & forecasting 

The costs associated with an enterprise MarTech stack are everchanging, and the cost of growing the stack can escalate quickly, especially when cloud costs are involved.

Too often, ‘cheap’ infrastructure hosting is considered initially. However, this is quickly offset by the dramatic escalation of cost due to a non-standardized, one-off, people-driven approach to system administration, managing deployments, security issues, performance issues and the often-unbudgeted cost of annual application upgrades.

But, with the ability to proactively predict your total cost of ownership, you can be confident your platform and team are growing together.

Difficulty scaling up, and down

If you cloud infrastructure has not been architected properly to automate the allocation of additional resources during traffic spikes – you may experience slow response times, downtime and reduced functionality.

By designing your infrastructure that allows for auto-scaling using load balancers, or Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), your resources will scale with the ebbs and flow of your traffic. This ensures your customers reach your website when they want to, and your resources scale back down after a peak – so you don’t pay for more than you need.

Risk of overspending

As mentioned above, auto-scaling isn’t just a feature to handle increased traffic loads, but also ensures the business is not paying for resources during low traffic intervals.

If your team (or your partners team) is not equipped with the right skills to ensure your targeted Site KPIs are met, driven by appropriate automation and tooling that is fine-tuned to your specific needs, you will struggle to effectively deal with demand and balance costs.

How Dataweavers WebOps helps 

We do content delivery at scale.

We prioritize reliability by implementing a minimum of two regions, ensuring that our customers receive a guaranteed uptime of 99.9%, or even 99.99% for our premium deployment and management services. Our auto-scaling capabilities, combined with flexible options for unlimited or capped processing, allow us to cater to our customers' specific needs. We do this with cost and capacity in mind and guarantee our customers delivery at a known price.

When it comes to deployment and management, we rely on proven architectures and leverage our automated platform tooling. Developed by our world-class Platform Engineering team, these tools empower us to efficiently support customer environments. Additionally, our expert Site Reliability Engineering team is always available to handle any issues that may arise, ensuring a seamless experience for our customers.

Our primary goal is to enable our customers to maintain their focus on the business objectives that matter most to them, while we take care of the rest with our WebOps platform.

Find more resources at dataweavers.com/cmo/velocity

Many customers do not have a clear view of what they are spending in effort to maintain their solution, or they are wholly under resourced. Download the Dataweavers BAU Calculator follow the instructions and see where you land.