Upcoming Chicago Symposium and The Guide into the Hosting Jungle

I've been a more than avid Sitecore supporter over the last (almost) decade. I've been in the trenches with the team, customers and product teams more than once. And that implies that I have seen the Sitecore platform evolve from pure CMS into the experience platform and more recently into all flavors and options that come with the platform or that can be added into.

It truly remains an enormously versatile platform overall!

With the introduction of more and more new architectures such as headless, best of breed and pure cloud based solutions, the landscape did begin to change though. Which provided Sitecore with quite a challenge as they were not ready for this transition.

Now, since the acquisition of Stylelabs / ContentHub, and subsequently all other platforms such as Moosend, Boxever, Four51, Reflektion, Sitecore acquired a lot of power and knowlegde and has since then ramped up its developing capabilities.

The ultimate goal? To move into a SaaS(-like) platform in a first phase and later offer a true native headless CMS system. Although that last part comes purely from hearsay and has not been acknowledged by the company.

In light of all the changes, setting up Sitecore isn't what is was from back in the day on version 6 - 7 and even 8. Not only is the setup more complex (due to its platform maturity) but it can be done in so many flavors.

This is one of the reasons I had proposed to bring a session to the Sitecore Symposium on these possible approaches.

In short, my session titled "A guide through the modern hosting jungle", had this synopsis:

Modern business and security requirements create very specific requirements on hosting and infrastructure setup. We find that existing & new customers are at a loss at deciding which direction to choose. This presentation is aimed at helping IT and business users identify if they would best fit into OnPrem, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, CaaS or Managed Cloud. A high to mid level comparison, a decision tree to provide insights on their own specific case as well as a bridge into the Sitecore future.

Not only is the actual hosting choice a tough nut to crack these days purely from a cost and benefit (and knowledge) point of view. But this choice is also tightly coupled into the product for which you are making the choice.

Meaning that any company that is (in these trying times) is looking to invest into their digital landscape will start to look for the most flexible and cost-optimal approach as possible.

Over the last years, we have seen customers (both new and existing) struggle when it comes down to the actual start of their project once the business requirements as well as the IT requirements become clearer. Both IT and DevOps employees typically take up the role as stakeholders and decision maker during the selection of the new platform. In order to do this they require a first and good understanding of what the different types of hosting solutions out there are. Next to the different hosting solutions out there such as OnPrem, IaaS, CaaS, PaaS, Managed Cloud… it is equally important to have a good understanding of AWS, Azure and Google hosting and the compatibility of the chosen product with these platforms.

Even in our team, we have gone through several migration and assessment exercises over the last years in order to build up a good insight in what technology matches best to what case. On the one hand to evaluate on the performance, quality & setup and on the other hand to provide the customer/prospect with a best approach and cost estimation to move forward. This was done for of existing and new customers simply to provide them with a range of possibilities and pros and cons.

My presentation's goal was to provide a decision tree or matrix that would help attendees to have a founded understanding of the various options and what their (on paper) best fit would be to move forward with. 

Unfortunately, my presentation has not been withheld and would most likely now become a string of Sitecore blog posts here. 

BUT... I will only do this after the Symposium of '22 since I want to see what Sitecore is going to bring to the table during the Symposium and especially during the MVP summit as well! They might bring a whole new set of guidelines, best practices, products and road-map that may very well invalidate all the things we have built up over the last decade.

The market is changing, the product(s) are changing and everything needs to be fast and nimble as well as easily connectable and scalable.

As you can read between the lines. I've got high hopes or aspirations for this symposium but I'll try to keep my expectations low and let the Symposium blow me away.

Hope to see you in Chicago in what is now a little over a month away.

https://symposium.sitecore.com/