Scale Out Content Management AppService

Question

I'm looking at options to scale out a content management app service as we have some custom APIs running on CM that will generate load.

The docs state that we need to specify a distinct InstanceName for each instance and then specify one in Publishing.PublishingInstance.

I can't think of a way to do specify a different InstanceName per app instance - or at least one predictable enough for us to specify in Publishing.PublishingInstance.

So my current plan is to deploy a separate cm app service configured as a publishing instance that doesn't scale so that the "main" cm app instance can be configured to auto-scale.

Is there a better way? We're not ready to move to the Sitecore Host Publishing Service yet.

Answer 1

When you Scale Out, you lose the ability to play with InstanceName since it is tied to Sitecore.config, and as Scale Out generates a copy of the File System to provide your application in multiple instances, you cannot have different files per instance.

At this time, Sitecore does not support Scale Out of Content Management App Service, and I only could find this answer in the Managed Cloud documentation.

Also, we had a meeting with Sitecore, and they said despite the fact that Scale Out isn't supported for CM, we could have as much CM as we wanted if each CM was dedicated to an App Service Plan.

In addition to that, please keep in mind that the same rules applies if you had multiple CM instances on-premises, you cannot have all CMs executing the same functions such as Publishing, Indexing and EXM, so you have to either have one of the CMs dedicated to it or split these to your CMs.