Sitecore 9 PaaS architecture: provisioning content delivery

Question

I'm in charge of provisioning a new Sitecore system on Azure as PaaS. I want to provision 3 environments in as many different regions. Still I want to have a main region which will provision a full XP installation, while the other 2 regions (slave) will provision only the CD. Each slave CD-DB will be configured as a publish target in the main region and will be feeding XDB and forms database.

So the question is: how can I achieve this? I already provisioned the main region with the ARM templates and it's working fine. Now I need to provision the slave regions, but I can't find enough information on how to achieve this.

Can I use the clone function in Azure and modify config files later?

Thanks in advance

Garboard

What you’re trying to do is nontrivial, and probably too many considerations to provide proper guidance in this forum. You will need to consider latency issues and compensate with a CDN. SQL active geo replication won’t help because the secondaries are read only. I’m not sure if the publishing engine can publish to more than one target at once, if so that might help; it’s an uncommon model. The bigger problem will be xDB as there is no multi master DB support there either, so you’ll need multiple Mongo clusters and processing servers and a custom job to put the data back together. – Garling

> You will need to consider latency issues and compensate with a CDN Yes, I didn't put it in the picture, but we'll use a CDN for caching static elements >SQL active geo replication won’t help because the secondaries are read only I won't use a replication, but different DBs – Garboard

I’m not sure if the publishing engine can publish to more than one target at once We won't publish to more than a target at once The bigger problem will be xDB as there is no multi master DB support there either I will use a single master in the main region, which will publish specific content (for specific markets) to the other regions you’ll need multiple Mongo clusters and processing servers It's Sitecore 9. No MongoDB – Garboard

so if there’s no replicated dbs, a single db publishing target, and a single xDB (SQL or Mongo, problem is the same), then are all your apps the world over are connecting to a geographically remote DB? Apparently high latency isn’t a big issue. Sorry but it’s no longer clear what the actual question is? You don’t need to modify any configs do you? Just deploy to multiple sites in your CI/CD pipeline, no? – Garling

Apps will be in different regions, communicating with regionalized web and core dbs. One master for CM in the main region, which is going to publish to the geolocated WEB dbs. XDB works in the background AFAIK), so no latency issues – Garboard

Seems you have it all figured out. So what exactly is the question? – Garling

How to provision it, since the ARM templates can't provision the CD only – Garboard

ARM templates are just giant JSON objects; you’ll need to modify it removing the elements you don’t need. An ARM template generally only applies to 1 resource group, which is a single region, so you’ll need to run the ARM deploy for each region you want to deploy to. Load up a VS Azure Resource Group project and plonk the scrips in there, it’ll be easier to see what’s going on as there’s a document navigation pane – Garling

Answer 1

I would approach it like this:

1. Left side of your diagram provision as-it-is from the original Sitecore ARM template – XP scaled.
2. For the right side of your diagram will: a. provision instance Sitecore XM single ARM template (delete master and forms database, reconfigure the web app role to be CD) b. or customized a bit the XM scaled ARM template (removed CM and not needed database)
3. Fix configuration – add traffic manager, connection strings as needed etc.

as reference: https://doc.sitecore.net/sitecore_experience_platform/setting_up_and_maintaining/sitecore_on_azure/deploying/sitecore_configurations_and_topology_for_azure

Calumet