The Sitecore Managed Cloud environment
Understand the naming conventions and resources of a Sitecore Managed Cloud environment.
Each Sitecore Managed Cloud environment, whether you are hosting Sitecore XM, XP, or xDB, has standard storage locations, naming conventions, and common resources. All of your environment resources are set up inside a Resource Group that you have permissions to manage within that group or to add new resources. This topic describes: Naming conventions, common resources, XM resources, and xDB resources.
In Sitecore, all resources follow the same naming convention: resourceGroupName-sitecoreRoleName-resourceTypeAcronym by using lowercase. For example, if your resource group name is Production then your web database resource name would be production-web-sql. This naming convention makes it much easier to identify what a resource does simply by looking at the name.
The following Microsoft Azure® resources are common to Sitecore XM and xDB deployments:
Search – Sitecore stores all of its search indexes in Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search.
Monitoring – Sitecore uses Application Insights as a one-stop-shop for all monitoring requirements. Sitecore channels all logs and performance counters into Application Insights because they do not work in a Web App environment.
Session State – Sitecore uses Microsoft Azure Redis as the distributed backend for its session state store. Azure Redis is not present in the xDB hosting solution because it is only required on the client's side.
A Sitecore XM deployment uses the following Microsoft Azure resources:
Web Apps – XM has two Web applications with accompanying App Service Plans, one for the Content Delivery role and another for the Content Management role.
Databases – XM has three databases and two SQL servers. One SQL server contains the Master and Core databases and the other has the Web database. This means that you can split the databases across different servers and allow for network isolation later if you choose.
A Sitecore xDB deployment uses the following Microsoft Azure resources:
Web Apps – xDB has two Web applications with accompanying App Service Plans, one for the Processing role and another for the Reporting role.
SQL Databases – xDB has four databases and two SQL servers. One SQL server contains the Master, Core, and Reporting databases and the other has the Web database. This means that you can split the databases across different servers and allow for network isolation later if you choose.
The MongoDB Cluster – xDB includes a MongoDB cluster to host the analytics database and tracking databases. The cluster consists of two data nodes for failover and an arbiter node. The cluster is managed by the Sitecore Cloud Services team.