Managed Cloud Containers
This section describes the Managed Cloud Containers offering. If you have a PaaS solution, refer to Managed Cloud PaaS.
Managed Cloud Containers is only available for Managed Cloud Premium (MCP). The benefits included with Managed Cloud Premium are described in Introduction to Managed Cloud.
Managed Cloud Containers gives you:
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Full access to Sitecore instances and the ability to deploy custom code.
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The ability to deploy Sitecore with Docker containers or Kubernetes across a multitude of global data centers.
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The ability to deliver your Sitecore solution using an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) approach.
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Dedicated Azure DevOps infrastructure and application pipelines:
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Infrastructurepipeline - uses Terraform to read the configuration and synchronize every element of the deployment to match the settings in the configuration files. When the pipeline has run successfully, the Terraform state file is stored in an Azure Storage account. -
Applicationpipeline - the Application repository contains the configuration of every container used in the deployment. TheApplicationpipeline uses Ansible scripts to set up the AKS pods that contain each running container.
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Monitoring and support for production deployments using Grafana and Elasticsearch.
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A set of infrastructure services and add-ons available within a service catalog.
The following are the roles and responsibilities for Managed Cloud Containers:
Containers deployment process
The Containers deployment process enables a more complex architecture with Managed Cloud. Managed Cloud Containers supports the use of GitOps: a way of implementing continuous deployment for cloud native applications. With GitOps, you must manage all deployments through a Git repository that controls the deployment. Each repository contains configuration elements for the repository and changes to the deployment must be made by changing the appropriate configuration files in the repository. The Git repositories enable greater reliability and additionally take advantage of Git’s capabilities to support team review and approval mechanisms through pull requests, and the ability to roll back changes to an earlier state in the deployment’s history.
You can also manually reconfigure nonproduction deployments using the Azure portal but changes are lost the next time the solution is redeployed. Manual changes are not captured in the configuration files. Production deployments can only be customized by changing the configurations in two repositories:
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Infrastructure repository
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Application repository
Both repositories and pipelines are routinely used in the initial provisioning of the deployment by Sitecore.
The following diagram describes the key relationships between the Infrastructure repository, the Application repository, and many of the key elements of a typical Managed Cloud Containers deployment:
