SLH: Sitecore upgrade and infrastructure improvements

The challenge

It is always important to keep up with CMS releases as far as possible to avoid performance and security issues, but also to take advantage of the latest product roadmap features. SLH needed a Sitecore upgrade to bring the platform to the latest version (10.4) and unlock all its capabilities.

At the same time, SLH’s Azure infrastructure and related DevOps processes were not fully optimised for success. There were significant opportunities to reduce costs and improve performance.  For example, SLH’s build and release pipeline was inefficient, with significant opportunities to reduce deployment times, costs and effort.

Our work

The Sitecore upgrade was the perfect time to also overhaul SLH’s Azure infrastructure, so we recommended taking the opportunity to deliver both as part of the same project.

Working closely with the SLH team, we started working on the upgrade following 3chillies’ standard two-phase upgrade methodology,  initially undertaking a deep dive discovery and analysis phase to compile a task backlog. The second phase involved carrying out the actual upgrade.

In parallel, we completely re-architected SLH’s Azure infrastructure from the ground up, with a view to drive efficiencies. We also took the opportunity to improve the failover environment relating to the UK West Azure region, ensuring resiliency should the primary UK South Azure region have an outage.
Finally, we rebuilt SLH’s existing build and release pipeline from scratch, with a view to streamline costs and effort. 

The results

The upgrade to Sitecore 10.4 has brought significant improvements to performance to the backend. Several bugs have also now been resolved. The new version has also unlocked an improved editor experience, coupled with faster CMS times.

There has been a huge reduction in Azure hosting fees, with savings of approximately 46% on monthly costs. This saving alone means the entire cost of the upgrade and the infrastructure improvements will be paid within the first year of the upgraded site.

Improvements to SLH’s DevOps have resulted in tangible reduced effort, with permissions and source control management much simpler.  There is also a simplified SSL certificate update process.  

The rebuild of the build and release pipeline has also resulted in a simplified process, with no longer any reliance on expiring tokens and other old extensions. This improvement has resulted in:  

• Further reduced costs.
• A reduction in build times from an average 40 minutes to 12 minutes.
• A reduction in release times to development, test and production environments – an average release time to production has been reduced from 100 minutes to 27 minutes. 

The future

Overall, the reduction in hosting costs, improvement in infrastructure, overhaul of DevOps processes and upgrade to Sitecore 10.4 has put SLH in a position of strength to extend and improve digital experiences for its customers going forward.

We’re excited to continue working with SLH to expand and optimise their digital footprint.