xCommerce
7:17 PM
Sitecore & xCommerce: Azure and integrations FAQ
There are situations when your clients use more than only CMS system. Of course now they would like to use Sitecore but with xCommerca part. Is it all? No, they have also some other internal 3rd party systems like own PIM or ERP, CRM or all of them at once.
So now we can start to think how we should to integrate them? Let's check a few approaches which we can chose depends on client needs and our abilities. To make it we will go through a path, sort of journey of questions which you should answer during approaching to your enterprise app to the world.
Hosting
First of all we should think where we would like to keep our solution. Currently, I don't think I should touch things like:
- internal hosting infrastructure or
- external providers
Because right now we have cloud age and we will go in Azure! ;)
In Azure as a cloud we also have 2 directions:
Each of the path has own specific pros and cons, let's point some of them:
IaaS:
- DevOps maintanance
- Flexibility (issue)
- Complicated solution
PaaS
- Simpler maintanance
- Felxibility (pros)
- Easy to scale
- Fancy solution!
When we decide how we will host, then we should to ask ourselves about:
Deploy path
Here we have a two ways:
Marketplace is well known place to get our Sitecore App, but if we want to make something custom we should ARM templates to define our own rules.
We also should to remember that ARMs templates:
They
don’t deploy app code itself, but
only define structure of resources
Since we know:
- Where we will host app
- How we gonna to deploy on it
We should asks ourselves what about security? This is the most important when you are working with enterprise clients and their solutions. But I'm pretty sure they will not let you forget about that :)
Integration 3rd Party Systems Security and Privacy
- Azure Gateway
Microsoft describes that the gateway works as a bridge that provides quick data transfer and
encryption between data sources on premises and your logic apps. You can
use the same gateway installation with other cloud services, such as
Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Azure Analysis Services.
- Logic Apps
Combining Azure Logic Apps and Azure OnPrem Gateway gives an ability to process and consume date gathered from on-prem services we have integrated with. You have simple way to
- Hybrid Connection
To simplify we can get information from documentation which says that Hybrid Connections can be used to access application resources in other networks. It provides access from your app to an application endpoint. It does not enable an alternate capability to access your application. As used in App Service, each Hybrid Connection correlates to a single TCP host and port combination. This
means that the Hybrid Connection endpoint can be on any operating
system and any application, provided you are accessing a TCP listening
port. The Hybrid Connections feature does not know or care what the application protocol is, or what you are accessing. It is simply providing network access.
- ASE (App Service Environment)
The last one but not least is ASE which represents isolated environemnt inside the Azure Cloud. You can imagin that you have your own hardware resereved only for you in ASE. Basing on that you have wide scope of priviliges to set up you network. You can e.g. hide completly URL to you App services based on that infrastructure. It's really interesing to have so much powers in Azure to use.
Ok basing that let's assume we have choosed ASE, so how could look our infrastructure?
Infrastructure diagram based on Azure ASE approach
For purpose of our excercise let's assume that we would like to integrate with:
- 2 kinds of ERPs
- CRM
- Some Data Warehouse
- Product managemet system (PIM)
First of all, in this picture we can see that ASE contains WebApps, but not databases. It's because of ASE properties, which allow only to keep App services.
Integration part is delegatd to independent solution which can be maintanance separetly without issues with Sitecore team as well. Besides it provides abiliti to scale it separately as well. Although it also depends on you needs. Because e.g. PIM product synchronization could be an activity which will be invoke once per day (at night for instance), so this is something what we really can extract to independent layer.
However, we can also have a situation where ERP integration will be used 'on the fly' to get e.g. prices per specific customer. Does it mean it's also good to keep in a separate layer?
Well, not excatly. Maybe it's a good idea to this part of integration make in xCommerce area? Then you will can easly assign to xCommerce prices pipline or add and API to make it possible for Sitecore to ask for those data.
We also should mention about Azure Gateway (WAF) which allows to filter traffic to our ASE and set proper network rules. We also have divided here SOLR environment outside, which can be hosted on external VMs for example.
Everythings depens on you needs, but hopefully this diagram will help you to understand approach, constraints and ways how to make it.
Cheers !
