What is Sitecore XM Cloud and what is not – or what is behind it?Anyone who knows Sitecore, especially from earlier times, is probably familiar with Sitecore XM or Sitecore XP, but what is XM Cloud?Sitecore XM and XP are the “classic” OnPrem installations of the CMS and DXP from Sitecore. XM is the „smaller“ version without personalization and marketing automation options, I like to refer to this version as the CMS. Sitecore XP is the „big brother“ of XM with these above-mentioned advanced features such as analytics, personalization, marketing automation, etc. XM Cloud and Sitecore XM have even had the same code base since version 10.3, i.e. the same „core“ but with one absolutely important difference: XM Cloud is a SaaS (Software as a Service) Application and an important Part of the Sitecore composable DXP stack (Digital Experience Platform).
SaaS means you don’t have to install anything, you don’t have to worry about hosting, hardware etc., you don’t have to install any bug fixes and you don’t have to carry out any updates yourself. All of this is done directly by the manufacturer (Sitecore).Furthermore, XM Cloud is based on a MACH architecture. Mach stands for Microservice, API first, Cloud native and Headless. Now you have to understand what this means. Many applications used to have a monolithic structure, one large, entire piece of software. Microservices means that the software consists of many smaller individual pieces of software which are therefore much easier to maintain, can be scaled better and can be further developed by specialized experts.API first means that these small pieces of software can be accessed via interfaces you provide, which makes it much easier to connect the software. Cloud native means the fact that software has been developed and optimized purely for the cloud platform on which it runs. This has the advantage that you don’t need any other systems to operate the software, such as containers or similar. This makes it possible to use the elastic scaling of software specific to clouds, which enormously increases the scalability and performance of a software.And last but not least Headless. Headless is an architectural approach in which an application provides absolutely no front end but only the backend and functionality which is accessible via interfaces to its functions on which a completely independent head (the front end) can then be set up. This has the advantage that you are not tied to any specific programming languages. You can use any frontend language of your choice, which obviously makes things a lot easier when developer resources are limited.If you are now curious about XM Cloud and are interested in details about features and functions as well as a few impressions, I will show them in the next post.What is: XM Cloud Part 1
