Delivering The Sitecore Experience

On a recent project, we proposed microservices architecture for e-commerce to the a client and it was a no brainer.  The next decision was to choose a hosting provider. The client had subscriptions for both AWS and Azure and since the team predominantly had Microsoft skills, that decision was easy enough as well.  In Microsoft Azure, we primarily were looking at two options: Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) Azure Service Fabric (ASF) The System Engineers were pretty set on their recommendation of AKS but the client wanted to go through a detailed analysis of  the pros and cons before arriving at a decision. So the team put together a good comparison chart between the AKS and ASF and arriving at the conclusion that AKS is the future of for hosting microservices.  During all the analysis and research, our CTO came across a very elegant decision tree that made it much easier for the client to digest and arrive at their own conclusion. I thought it was worth a share, so h

There was a great report from Gartner a while back that summarized e-commerce architectures into three categories: Commerce-led architecture Experience-led architecture API-led architecture Following which, Rob Earlam wrote a great summary of Sitecore Experience Commerce's experience-led architectur e. Looking back at my e-commerce experience, I would like to propose a possible fourth one, which is Hybrid Architecture.   Now, before I get into the Hybrid architecture. Let me quickly summarize these three architecture types. Commerce-led Architecture The idea here is simple, self-contained commerce solution, often times a monolith, where each every commerce feature is tightly coupled. The advantage in this case is in quickly deriving ROI from the system by shortening the time to market. However, there are several disadvantages to this approach such as single point of failure, lack of scalability options, high cost of maintenance etc. Experience-led Architectur