For a while I have been wanting to use JetBrains Rider instead of Visual Studio, but the lack of remote debugging possibilities for Windows container processes stopped me from doing so.

Sitecore 9 is moving towards a micro-service based architecture and is designed with the cloud in mind. The community has picked this development up by creating Docker images for Sitecore. This works great for local development, but it still has some challenges when deploying to the cloud. This changed with the recent introduction of Windows support for Kubernetes (K8S) and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for Windows containers.

Recently we upgraded to Sitecore XP 9.1.1 and XC 9.1.0. This is the first version of XC that uses XP 9.1. Version 9.1 introduces a system wide Identity service which was in 9.0 only used for Commerce. For the Sitecore CMS this change means that for login you will be redirected to the Identity server, and upon successful login redirected back to the request URL.

Since a while we store Docker images in our Azure Container Registry (ACR). Everytime we tag a commit in git, an amount of 22 Docker images are automatically pushed to our registry (see this article for details). Very easy indeed, but it also causes a forever growing registry. While it's not a lot, it does cost money to store images in ACR: €0.003/GB/day.

Looking to automate your Sitecore Docker image build?

We decided to leverage the free (❣), for open source software, Azure Pipelines offering from Microsoft for this. This article describes how we achieved a fully automated Sitecore Docker image build using Azure Pipelines.

Building a single Docker image is straightforward, building multiple Docker images is slightly more difficult, but building multiple Docker images that depend on eachother is a daunting task. The latter is where a good build system can really help you.