Is it too risky to move to the first release of Sitecore XM Cloud?

Akshay Sura 

Today we'll be talking about if it is too risky to move to the first release of XM cloud. We obviously have some thoughts to share of our own and hopefully it'll give you some idea as to if it's worth it or not. This video is mainly the audience is for CMOS, CTOs, CIOs, architects, anyone who's making decisions in terms of moving to XM cloud. My name is Akshay Sura. I've been a Sitecore MVP for a few years been part of the Sitecore community. And with me I have is,

Kamruz Jaman 

I am Kamruz Jaman. I've also been an MVP a few times, been part of the Sitecore community for 12, 13 years, and been in the IT space for over 25 years.

Akshay Sura 

And so before we get to the part about if it's the right move to go to the first version of XM Cloud, usually in the in the service slash software space, everyone's like a little bit adamant that right? Oh, no, I don't want to touch the first version of it. Because give them time to improve it, give them time to do things. So I think it comes from that angle. But we do want to acknowledge that this move from Sitecore is a good first step towards the right direction, right, the composable direction, I think in one of our previous videos, we did talk about that. So yeah,

Kamruz Jaman 

absolutely. And I think Sitecore world, we've, I think we've always had this attitude not to go to the first release of any major Sitecore release, right? So a 7.0. Or, or an 8.0. You know, we we've tended to or even an 8.1, we've tended to not go to those versions because of issues and those releases. And then we've we have taken a bit more of a pragmatic approach where we'd wait until that first update release was done, because that has a bunch of fixes and performance enhancements and things like that, right.

Akshay Sura 

Yep. So this is a quote, I will leave to Kamruz because I mess it up each time.

Kamruz Jaman 

Well, actually, this is a quote that I stole from Dennis is the another partner, one of our partners here Konabos, right. So we take the approach that evolution is better than revolution. Because when you have a revolute, when you have a revolution, you always have martyrs, right? There's always somebody who is who gets thrown to the wolves. So these evolutionary steps, bring us closer to our target, but in the smaller and more manageable increments. And we're not, we're not 10 going off course, you know hugely, of course, we get to our destination.

Akshay Sura 

We didn't want to go backward on that we

Kamruz Jaman 

definitely don't want to go backwards. So

Akshay Sura 

we talked about XM cloud, what it does include, and we wanted to kind of show you this slide the comments on the right, or what we shared in our previous video. But this is an image which kind of shows the architecture in terms of what XM cloud does include, again, we're not trying to be technical, we don't this is not a technical video at all. But it shows you that it's in order a lot of things make up XM cloud is essentially what we're trying to say it's a unit of many little services and all of them together come together and give you like the what you're looking for in terms of this offering. So going to the next one, and this is this is an interesting one. So Kamruz came up with this approach where he's like, okay, you know, I really don't think it is in XM cloud is a combination of all the things Sitecore has done in the past and has improved and has experience on it. And that's how this whole thing started. Him coming up with this so Kamruz you want to kick us off. Yeah.

Kamruz Jaman 

So I think there's a lot of people within a Sitecore space within our community who are looking at XM cloud and thinking oh, it's just completely brand new thing that Sitecore have released, how does it work? What is it going to do? How do we work with it? How do we integrate with it? But it But in my mind, it's not something which is just been plucked out of thin air, right? It's not something that has been plucked out of the clouds in a particular case, right? It is Sitecore, building on their core competencies over a good number of years. And then when I was breaking it down in my mind, I'm like, well, actually, it's just gone from this to this to this. And they brought this in, and then they brought that in. And now they've managed to package this entire thing up in the most modern way, they can actually take it to the next level and release it as a SaaS offering.

Akshay Sura 

Yep. And then, so we started looking at it from, you know, the Sitecore even know what they're doing. Right. So they started back in the early 2000s. People who have been let's I started in five, three, I think Kamruz started in six. So people who have done this for over a decade, understand that Sitecore wasn't built in one day, it evolved over a period of time taking in what was happening in the market and things like that. So if you're looking around Sitecore, six or so is when the page editor came in, so visually being able to edit your pages. So what you see is what you get WYSIWYG. And a lot of other core improvements to Sitecore came in, in version six, as to how you deal with items, workflows, all of that fun stuff. And that kept on improving year on year, right. So they were not they were considered the CMS to go to all these fortune 500 companies were looking at them for the CMS competency. So again, in a new experience editor came in, which is an improvement based on page editor. But the look and feel change as Azure PaaS started. And then SXA version one came into SXA. So if people don't know that, the history of it, so it started as Zen Garden by Cognifide. And that was something Sitecore bought, redid a lot of tooling in order to make it more usable part of the Sitecore framework. And they launched it back in 2016. And then managed cloud offering started which was a little bit different to PaaS now. Now even though there are external vendors doing the actual infrastructure managing Sitecore got into the SLA, they got into the servicing the customer managing the cloud. So that was that was an experience, you can just forget. So keep all of this in mind as we're going through. And then JSS started. Kamruz, you know, this is more than I do. So

Kamruz Jaman 

I did actually worked on a couple of sites, which were built on the tech review initial tech reviews. So JSS was initially released in 2018. That added essentially the original headless services onto the Sitecore. CMS right. And obviously, JSS's headless services is headless development is huge now. But I think as we look into JSs, a weight has evolved over time, we'll talk about that in a minute, you'll see that again, it's not just that JSs was always JSS it was released, it will and it's gone through several evolutionary processes in its own right, all of these products have right. So even coming on to the next bit with horizon, initial version of horizon was launched in 2019. Again, this is built upon Sitecore, own experience and knowledge having built the page editor having built the experience editor, and develop that into a more modern framework. Sitecore by this point has had been trying to split out their services, right from being this singular, monolithic platform, and to be more cyberspace. So horizon was one of these, right? So they built a page editor and a new next generation page editor, which was faster, more snappy, more responsive, you know, had all the built in Tallinn for responsive so you could preview in a mobile or a tablet in portrait mode in landscape mode. But it worked as an external service using API calls back to the main CMS which is again how JSs was working, right? It was a service layer that you know, you had an external application that was calling back into into REST API. So you can see it breaking out into this kind of semi composable structure built on to or built on top of the monolith. So you can see where it's going. previous videos, they they done things like the Sitecore publishing service, which was again, an external service calling into into the main core platform so they will bolting on the services to try it. split it out.

Akshay Sura 

Yeah. And then they started containerization talked about Docker AKs. So stuff was happening. Content serialization is another interesting one to point out,

Kamruz Jaman 

I'm gonna get into the containers. It was funny, like the containers was something that came out of the community. Right. I was watching a video a few months back. And it was Per Bearing, talking about Sitecore in containers at site at sugcon. North America, which is one of the, the event that you and Mike, Mike Reynolds had organized right back in 2016. That's how far back he was talking about Sitecore containers. Sitecore had brought us together in 2020, and released it for Sitecore 10, as an official offering from Sitecore . And yeah, and along the same sort of time, they'd released this Sitecore content serialization, as you mentioned, yeah. Yeah. Which introduced the serialization was interesting. Interesting, because they introduced it was part of the serialization was one part of a CLI a service offering for Sitecore CLI. And the content serialization was one that a part of it. So again, this, this, this is just part of this evolutionary journey. Yeah. And

Akshay Sura 

then they had a lot of experience from a serialization perspective, right? So, for instance, it was hedgehog TDs, this unit, unicorn on the other end, so there's a lot of learning Sitecore used to come up with their own serialization service, or what we're trying to show in this, all of this is, how much evolution took place, how much knowledge is there, and how much experience is there. And then now, when we come into 2021, we're tied to Sitecore experience edge. And this was a very important, I think, release in terms of going more towards composable and headless, where all your information right at scale, yeah, all the content you have is now being pushed to the edge to CDN. So all across the world, so you can consume them. Wherever you are really quickly. In any platform you want, as long as you can, you're able to consume it from a Graph QL endpoint, you're able to do that. I think that is a big game changer in terms of how the content was being delivered. And there were a lot of learnings from it. They're all of this have existing customers using it. So it's not like they are in a an abandoned state by any means they are being actively used. So things are being worked on, improved upon on a daily basis. And then the next is SDK Kamruz. So can you talk a little bit about that with when it used to have its own custom endpoint? And then they switched it to the edge?

Kamruz Jaman 

Yeah, so we've obviously been big fans of next Jas, it's we've been working in this composable jamstack space, right? Takes a lot of boxes, it's industry leading. There's a lot, a lot of great features in there. So it's great to see Sitecore, bring this to the JSs platform. It allows super simple different deployments. We know this, right? Scalability is just through the roof with work for sale, particularly when I was doing the sell. But you can obviously use things like Netlify as well. But yes, it but next.js is a bit of a different framework, right? It's built on React, but it's a bit of a different framework and react. And you have to work with things like differently. So Sitecore ad, then provided next gen support in the in the GSS SDK packages. So you could use psych or exam or exam in this particular case, use the edge endpoints and statically go out and build sites using next.js deployed out to Vercel or whoever you want it. This was pre cloud, right? This was pre cloud. But again, this is this is a combination that a lot of little steps that we've had to get to this point of having the experience edge out there, using next.Js with the JSs SDK, which in turn would actually use the edge edge endpoints rather than the traditional layout service endpoints which JSs had used. Again, that allows for this pushing, pushing out to the edge targets and the global scaling.

Akshay Sura 

Now, if we take a look at the XM cloud in a different way, so these are all the different components which actually make up XM cloud, right, so we talked about the evolution in terms of how this all started Sitecore as a CMS has been evolving. has been like the CMS for a long period of time. Now when you look at it from a composable, this perspective, they came up with XM cloud, which will help you definitely do that. It contains few things. So like if we recap on all of this, so Kamruz, you pick which which column you want to take the left or the right.

Kamruz Jaman 

I'll take the right, I'll take the right so I'll go

Akshay Sura 

the left one then. So as I say, how we showed that it was Zen garden. It was released a long time ago, SXA itself has gone through several iterations, it has a big fan following an amazing tool to build sites really easily work simultaneously with your dev teams in order to have these sites build up pretty quickly. It's part of it, it has a history. So technically, they have taken the learnings from all of this to include it as part of XM cloud, nothing to worry about from my end. So I give it the check write containers. God knows how much we've worked on containers for the past few years. So we have gone through working with containers, not only on local, but on production. But on the infrastructure perspective, I do want to keep mentioning this XM cloud is a service offering, we shouldn't really worry about how exactly the containers are stored in the background, how they are layered, how is the infrastructure provided, as long as the SLA s are being met Sitecore as a service provider, they take care of everything with XM cloud, it's a managed service. So I'm not worried about it. I'll give it a check on that one site called experience edge we've actually had experience working on and we had the opportunity to provide feedback and work with the team. We built a POC back a couple of years ago on next.js and edge working with content, how back in that day, works really well. And I think the Graph QL endpoint has improved a lot since the last time I've used it. So I give it a check. So all of these things are things they've done it in the past, they've perfected it works really well. So I'm good on that

Kamruz Jaman 

part. Yeah, then on the JSs. Front, obviously been around since 2018. It's now released version 20. I think there's an open it's on GitHub. So there's an open source repository that people have contributed tribute to the next.Js fraud, it's been out for a couple of releases on on that front as well. They've gone through a couple of iterations. There'll be sites out there which are, which are live on this on the next.Js front. JSs also integrates really well already with SXA. So you can scaffold your JSs sites out using the SXA framework. Headless Of course, JSs is a headless offering, prior to that Sitecore had some very light headless offering with things like the Sitecore services clients and the item web API's. But JSs really took that to the next level. It was slightly different to a lot of the offerings with some of the headless vendors, because Sitecore being Sitecore, it's all about page composition as well. Right. So JSs had the advantage that it wasn't just the data, it also gives you the page composition, and all of that great page editing experience. And with the Sitecore sterilization. Sitecore , obviously had its own serialization format for a long time, although it wasn't us. It was used by TDs originally, then unicorn came along, improved it into the Yaml format. TDs supported that Yaml format going forward and then Sitecore  made that as part of that gave the option of adding both formats. And then Sitecore 10, they released the Sitecore serialization. CLI, as well as bringing in some additional management tools. I think the great thing they've done with accent cloud, it's not just about composability XP, they've taken their own product, their own knowledge, their own offerings, and composed it together. In order to actually bring out x and bring about x and cloud. It's kind of cut out a little bit better right to compose your own products to bring out a composable offering.

Akshay Sura 

Never thought of that. That makes sense. So question so any questions? Again, we might not have answers to everything you have in terms of questions, but we're there to help you get answers reaches on Slack, email us. So we're more than happy to jump on and share our knowledge. Thanks again for watching.