2. Building for multi-site with decoupled front-ends and a microservice architecture

Scenario

My team found ourselves in an uncomfortable situation — our organisations tech strategy pointed towards container platforms and microservice architectures, yet much of the estate we were responsible for was powered by a traditional virtual machine based, monolithic architecture.

When you’re working with an enterprise CMS like Sitecore, it is very difficult to do anything other than follow the prescribed reference architectures to the T. In order to remain within the realms of an enterprise support agreement this is necessary, but it could be suboptimal for your bespoke…

Whilst digital transformation journeys are always challenging, with the right mix of people, technology and some lucky timing they can also be a lot of fun. In late 2018, Nationwide Building Society set about transforming our web estate using Sitecore JSS. We’ve learned a lot on the way, not only about technology, but also team transformation. This is our story so far.

Summer 2018

When I arrived at Nationwide I quickly learned that there was a huge transformation underway — £4.1Bn in spending… on tech! (press release here). That is an epic scale of investment that is both exciting and daunting. …

This is a multi-part article. In the coming weeks I’ll be publishing more articles to cover Projection Processing, Querying Materialized Views and a comparison with an Azure Functions approach.

Introduction

Keen to explore the realms of what is possible with Azure’s Serverless technologies, I decided there was no better way than to attempt to tackle a complex, modern software pattern: Command Query Responsibly Segregation, otherwise known as CQRS (with event sourcing & materialized views thrown in for good measure).

Primary objective: to be as service-full as possible and attempt to orchestrate an application with Logic Apps, without writing any code.

Secondary…