Our Installing Sitecore 9 series of posts will help you understand the overall architecture of Sitecore and how to install Sitecore. For the blog series we will install Sitecore on a local Windows 10 machine. Before installing Sitecore let’s look at what Sitecore is and what logical components it consists of.
The Sitecore Experience Cloud is divided into three distinct product areas. It contains:
- Sitecore Experience Management (XM) – content management and personalization features.
- Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) – content management, personalization, marketing and analytics features.
- Sitecore Experience Commerce (XC) – deliver personalized shopping experiences by integrating commerce and digital marketing
You can install the entire Sitecore Experience Platform, just the Sitecore Experience Management solution or our Sitecore Experience Commerce. One of the main benefits of Sitecore from an architectural point of view is these products seamlessly integrated with each other. These products have been build using the same philosophy and development approach. You can start with our Experience Management solution, add all the marketing and analytics features later by adding the Experience Platform. And when you are ready to start doing commerce install the Experience Commerce solution.
Besides the seamless integration the whole Sitecore Experience Cloud is developed with one thing in mind; flexibility. Not only for integrating with third parties, but also for scalability. Sitecore uses the latest Microsoft technology and is moving towards a micro-services architecture. With the introduction of our latest version you can host different application roles on separate servers to make sure you can handle peak traffic. This can all be done in an on-premise hosting environment but also in the cloud. Sitecore is being built with a cloud-first mindset and to natively support all the Microsoft Azure web services.
For development purposes it is also possible to run the whole platform on your local Windows machine. With this blog post series, we will focus on installing the whole platform on your local Windows machine. We will look on how to setup a blank Windows machine to match all the prerequisites. Then we will dive into the new Sitecore Installation Framework and how to utilize that to install the most recent version of Sitecore. Finally, we will look on how to install Sitecore Experience Commerce on your local machine.