With Sitecore 9, there’s been a ton of changes when it comes to infrastructure.  With more first-party love for Azure, the entire PaaS model has become more front-and-center.  What does this mean from a third party software point of view?  Here’s a few quick takeaways:

Search

• Solr is a baseline, due to security reasons. Is Lucene out?  There are configs available…but don’t trust it, imo.
• Azure Search has first party support!

Analytics

• xDB support does not include Mongo as of 9.0 Tech Preview, and we’ve been told it won’t be supported in 9.0 GA.  With that said, Sitecore did note it would be coming “shortly after” release of GA.  Not sure on timing
• Other DB Providers are supported. MSSQL 2016 is out of the box.  That’s right…you can do all your analytics gathering, processing, and reporting without ever leaving MSSQL.
• Other DB Providers aside from MSSQL are here too:  Cosmos DB, Azure SQL, and Azure Document DB.

HTTP

• HTTPS is now the preferred method of architecture, including Solr connectivity.  This helps support the Encryption-Everywhere approach.

Installation

• Installation is now Cloud-first with Powershell support in form of the Sitecore Install Framework (SIF).

That’s not all. Keep your eyes peeled for more info as it becomes available during Symposium

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