Skip to main content

SDL Web 8 - Content Delivery Microservices

Image
By
Among the new features in SDL Web 8 there are the Content Delivery Microservices, namely:
  • Audience Manager
  • Content Deployer
  • Contextual Image Delivery
  • Discovery Service
  • Dynamic Content
  • Dynamic Linking
  • Profiling and Personalization
  • Metadata Query
  • Taxonomy
  • User Generated Content

These microservices make up the Content Interaction Services and they expose the existing Content Delivery in-process APIs as RESTful services. They provide the server-side component in a Services-Oriented Architecture and act as data layer between the the web client and the Content Delivery Storage Layer.

According to the SDL marketing, these microservices:
  • Simplify upgrades, thus offering shorter time to value
  • Modernize architecture, offering better separation between the web application and Tridion APIs
  • Offer more flexibility with less downtime and improved scalability
  • Improve quality, being self-running, contained and having less dependencies

In technical words, these microservices are self-contained, self-running entities, embedding an Apache Tomcat instance, which are in fact Spring Boot packages designed to (according to Spring documentation) "get you up and running as quickly as possible" and to provide an "easy way to create stand-alone, production-grade Spring based Applications that you can 'just run'".

There is a clear change in direction towards services and simplification in Web 8. The installation steps for each of the microservices are almost trivial, all having just a couple of configuration files needed for modifications. They can be run as standalone applications by simply executing the provided scripts, or alternatively, they can be installed as Windows services. There will be no need to install Tomcat or another application server, although you still can, if you choose to.

From a caching perspective, the microservices use the usual in-memory object cache that relies on the Cache Channel Service notification to expire its dependency cache regions. Web 8 also provides a set of native REST client libraries for each of the microservices. Their cache is much simpler -- TTL based in-memory cache.

More about the specifics of microservices, installation guides and explanations, in later posts.



Labels:

Comments

VIKAS KUMAR (old blog, new: https://vikaskumarblogs.wordpress.com) said…
Nice post Mihai. Short and crisp. I had a very specific question on the this. I understand that the microservices run as a spring-boot (ready to use, embeded within tomcat) application, does this also mean they do not have a war file which tomcat uses? where actually can we find the war in linux?
01 March, 2019 22:59
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Running sp_updatestats on AWS RDS database

By
Part of the maintenance tasks that I perform on a MSSQL Content Manager database is to run stored procedure sp_updatestats . exec sp_updatestats However, that is not supported on an AWS RDS instance. The error message below indicates that only the sa  account can perform this: Msg 15247 , Level 16 , State 1 , Procedure sp_updatestats, Line 15 [Batch Start Line 0 ] User does not have permission to perform this action. Instead there are several posts that suggest using UPDATE STATISTICS instead: https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/145982/sp-updatestats-vs-update-statistics I stumbled upon the following post from 2008 (!!!), https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/sqlserver/en-US/186e3db0-fe37-4c31-b017-8e7c24d19697/spupdatestats-fails-to-run-with-permission-error-under-dbopriveleged-user , which describes a way to wrap the call to sp_updatestats and execute it under a different user: create procedure dbo.sp_updstats with execute as 'dbo' as...
1 comment
Read more

I Have Gone Dark

By Unknown
Maybe it's the Holidays, but my mood has gone pretty dark. That is, regarding the look and feel of my computer and Tridion CME, of course. What I did was to dim the lights on the operating system, so I installed Placebo themes for Windows 7 . I went for the Ashtray look -- great name :) My VM looks now like this: But, once you change the theme on Windows, you should 'match' the theme of your applications. Some skin easily, some not. The Office suite has an in-built scheme, which can be set to Black , but it doesn't actually dim the ribbon tool bars -- it looks quite weird. Yahoo Messenger is skinnable, but you can't change the big white panels where you actually 'chat'. Skype is not skinnable at all. For Chrome, there are plenty of grey themes. Now i'm using Pro Grey . But then I got into changing the theme of websites. While very few offer skinnable interfaces (as GMail does), I had to find a way to darken the websites... Enter Stylish -- a pl...
4 comments
Read more

REL Standard Tag Library

By
The RSTL is a library of REL tags providing standard functionality such as iterating collections, conditionals, imports, assignments, XML XSLT transformations, formatting dates, etc. RSTL distributable is available on my Google Code page under  REL Standard Tag Library . Always use the latest JAR . This post describes each RSTL tag in the library explaining its functionality, attributes and providing examples. For understanding the way expressions are evaluated, please read my post about the  Expression Language used by REL Standard Tag Library . <c:choose> / <c:when> / <c:otherwise> Syntax:     <c:choose>         <c:when test="expr1">             Do something         </c:when>         <c:when test="expr2">             Do something else         </c:when...
2 comments
Read more