Why Start Using Containers Now

1. Bart Plasmeijer / @bartplasmeijer
Software Architect @ Sitecore
November 2020
Sitecore on Containers
and AKS

2. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Container based CI/CD Flow
Users
IDE
Source Control
Build / CI
Container Registry
Release / CD AKS
Base Images
Developers
Commit
Specs
Content

3. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
A standardized unit of software.
Develop
Ship
Run anywhere
What is a Container?
https://www.docker.com/resources/what-containers
“Package Software into Standardized
Units for Development, Shipment and
Deployment.”

4. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Why Start Using Containers Now
5 Reasons You Need to Start Using Containers Now -- Virtualization Reviewhttps://kubernetes.io/docs
• TAKE 1 - They Are the Future
• TAKE 2 - They Are Secure
• TAKE 3 - A Plethora of Tools
• TAKE 4 - CI/CD is an Advantageous Process
• TAKE 5 - Containers have evolved and developed to the point where
you can safely place your bets on their technology and tools. …

5. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
“Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing
containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative
configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem.
Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available.”
What is Kubernetes (K8s)
https://kubernetes.io/docs

6. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Why do you need K8s?
• Service discovery and load balancing
• Storage orchestration
• Automated rollouts and rollbacks
• Self-healing
• Secret and configuration management

7. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
What is Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)?
AKS: Microsoft's managed Kubernetes service
• No charge for Control Plane
• Azure VMs for nodes (Linux or Windows)
• Backed by Azure Networking

8. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Do I need to learn K8s?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/product-categories/containers/

9. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Do I need to learn K8s?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/product-categories/containers/

10. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Do I need to learn K8s?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/product-categories/containers/

11. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Cluster
Node
K8s Concepts
Pod Pod
Cluster
A cluster is the Kubernetes
foundation. All the Kubernetes
objects that represent your
containerized applications all run on
top of a cluster.
Node
Pod Pod

12. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Node
K8s Concepts
Pod
Node
A Node is a worker machine
in Kubernetes and may be either a
virtual or a physical machine,
depending on the cluster.
Container
Container
Pod
Container
Container

13. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
K8s Concepts
Pod
Pod
A Pod is the smallest and simplest unit in
the Kubernetes object model. One or
multiple containers that are working
closely together are bundled in a Pod
together.
Container Container
Container Container

14. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
K8s Concepts
Deployment
A Deployment represents a desired
state for one or more pods.
Pod
Container
Container
Pod
Container
Container
Pod
Container
Container
Deployment
“I want three pods running my application”

15. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
K8s Concepts
Container
A container image is a ready-to-run
software package, containing
everything needed to run an
application.
Container
Application
Dependencies / Libraries
Configuration
Other requirements
https://containers.doc.sitecore.com/docs/intro

16. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
NodeNode
Service
K8s Concepts
Pod PodPod Pod
Service
A Service provides an abstract way
to expose an application running on
a set of Pods as a network service.

17. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
K8s Concepts
Ingress
An API object that manages
external access to the services in a
cluster, typically HTTP.
NodeNode
Service
Pod PodPod Pod
Service

18. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Namespace
Namespace
K8s Concepts
Namespace
A namespace is used to group
related resources within a cluster.
Node
Pod Pod
Service
Node
Pod Pod
Service
Node
Pod Pod
Node
Pod Pod
Service

19. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Secrets
• Kubernetes Secrets let you store and
manage sensitive information, such as:
• Passwords
• OAuth tokens
• SSH keys
• Storing confidential information in a
Secret is safer and more flexible than
storing it directly in a Container Image.

20. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Content Deployment
• Content deserialization provided
by new Sitecore serialization
framework
• Commands issued via new
Sitecore Command Line
Interface (CLI)
• Authentication handled via
Client secret configured with
Identity Server

21. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
Automating our Deployment
• Create Namespace
• Deploy External Specifications
• Deploy Init Specifications
• Deploy Application Specifications
• Patch IP restrictions
• Patch Container Versions
• Install Sitecore CLI
• Authenticate with ID
• Deserialize Content
• Publish Content

22. © 2001-2020 Sitecore Corporation A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property of their respective owners.
- Don’t store secrets in your repository
- Use CI variables to populate K8s Secrets
- Use K8s namespaces to group resources
- Plan how to setup your Data Storage roles in production
• SQL, Solr, Redis
- Automate your content deployments as you would with traditional
automated deployments
- For true High Availability plan for multiple AKS clusters in different
regions
Tips & Tricks

23. Thank you
FOR DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY.
Sitecore Confidential and Proprietary. ©2020 Sitecore Corporation
A/S. Sitecore® and Own the Experience® are registered trademarks
of Sitecore Corporation A/S. All other brand names are the property
of their respective owners.
Thank you