Sitecore 9.3 - media library blob storage

Sitecore 9.3 - Media Library Azure Blob Storage

Pieter Brinkman put out this tweet after Sitecore Symposium, with some information about Sitecore 9.3, for those of us not able to attend Symposium and see his session.

#SitecoreSYM is a wrap, now time to fire-up that blog engine. A lot to share around the upcoming #Sitecore 9.3 release. As a gesture of good will -> the deck is now available on https://t.co/B9DqZ9CLot pic.twitter.com/B8Qy9kzLF0
— Pieter Brinkman (@pieterbrink123) November 12, 2019

I also saw him present the at the London Sitecore User Group where he explained this slide deck in some more detail.

Some highlights for me:

Slide 12 - Top 5 core platform enhancements

Removing obsolete functionality “Lucene Search Provider” & “Sitecore.Nvelocity”
Experience Editor Improvements
Performance Improvements “Reducing number of calls”, “Reduce the amount of data saved”

I look forward to seeing some benchmarks about the performance improvements, and what areas this covers. When I first read this I had thought this might mean Sql calls, but he explained at the User Group was referring to personalisation/tracking. Still he only listed out his top 5, and hopefully the performance improvements extends to other areas.

Slide 35 - PaaS - Media Library in Azure Blob Storage

There is a footnote on Slide 35 & 36

“Media Library in Azure Blob Storage: Reduce the cost and increase the performance of storing media in Sitecore”

This is only listed for “PaaS” and the new “Managed Cloud”.

However I’d like to explore using Azure Blob Storage on Azure IaaS. Let’s see if this is possible when Sitecore 9.3 comes out.

I’d also like to find out if the Azure Blob Storage implementation just replaces the backing storage.

Or if it’s possible to serve the files direct from Blob Storage, bypassing the Sitecore Media library handler/disk caching on the Content Delivery servers. (Possibly with some other technology/thin API layer to provider resizing functionality)

Summary

Using Azure Blob Storage for the Sitecore Media Library for me is the most exciting development of Sitecore 9.3 that I’ve heard about so far, as could significantly reduce the size of the Sql databases.

Notes

Jammy Kam has customised Sitecore do use Azure Blob Storage for it’s Media Library before https://jammykam.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/sitecore-media-library-in-azure-cloud-storage-part-1/ https://jammykam.wordpress.com/2015/12/03/sitecore-media-library-in-azure-cloud-storage-part-2/

I wonder how similar the Sitecore implementation will be.