With the release of the Sitecore 10 platform a couple of years ago, Sitecore started to support running applications in containers and provided guidance on how to deploy a containerized Sitecore application to a Kubernetes cluster. Since then, Kubernetes specification files are now included in each new Sitecore release and a full example of the deployment process has been shared in the newly launched Sitecore MVP site GitHub repository.

The containerized approach is meant to compete with the established Sitecore PaaS approach, that instead consists in running the Sitecore platform in Microsoft Azure cloud platform using PaaS resources (like for example app services and app service plans). The path to adopt Sitecore containerized applications in production is still in its early phase, but it is gradually growing and progressing.

An area that could speed up the adoption and help with building confidence in running Sitecore on Kubernetes in production is monitoring. For Sitecore PaaS, monitoring has always been an integrated part of the delivered solution, thanks to the Sitecore Application Level Monitoring module (distributed as ARM templates on the Sitecore Azure Quickstart Templates repository) and the embedded instrumentation for Application Insights for all Sitecore role instances. With the introduction of containers, monitoring assets have been removed (or disabled) from the Sitecore application and there is no direct documentation support on how to procure and configure monitoring tools in Kubernetes. This choice has made the Sitecore containerized application agnostic of a particular hosting platform (AKS, EKS, GKE, …), but at the same time has removed a must-have feature for managing a complex application in production.

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