December 15, 2016
The Sitecore Experience platform supports a wide range of deployment options. In the previous posts of this series we covered basic terminology, provided an inventory of solution components, explored Sitecore roles, methods of horizontal scaling and the database tier. We now turn to a more in depth view of the xDB Cloud option.
See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.
The xDB Cloud offering is a managed service from Sitecore that allows you to offload the xDB infrastructure and licensing to the xDB Cloud Service. This includes the Processing and Aggregation, Reporting database (SQL/Oracle) and Mongo collections. xDB Cloud runs on Microsoft Azure.
We do not want to reinvent the wheel, so here is Sitecore’s diagram of what the xDB Cloud does.
xDB Cloud has some limitations, so we do encourage you to talk to your Sitecore representative and compliance teams about the current state of security standards. If you are collecting the default data that xDB would track, no big flags would be raised, but if you plan to inject custom data into xDB review carefully what your exposure might be.
There is no dev/test environment provided as part of the xDB Cloud service. This may mean adjusting your development, testing and deployment procedures to account for the possible uniqueness of the production environment.
Developers and QA staff will still need Mongo and the on-premise infrastructure to work and test day to day, but that configuration will be subtly different than production. Not a huge risk in this instance, but something to be aware of and not discount out of hand.
Again, we would encourage you to contact Sitecore directly for pricing, but if you do a true like for like comparison of the on-premise infrastructure and licensing required to match xDB cloud, the xDB Cloud offering is quite attractive.
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