What to Expect with the Sitecore Installation Framework in Sitecore Version 9.1

Exciting news came out of the 2018 Sitecore Symposium as it relates to the Sitecore Installation Framework (SIF). Sitecore Version 9.1 will come with several additions and capabilities that further deployment options.

These include (and one blaring exclude) the following:

Developer Workstation Templates – Stand up a developer instance with a dedicated SIF Role

Prerequisites Install Templates – Struggling with Prereqs should be resolved with a template versus creating your own

Uninstall Support – Backing out of an install, especially if a communication issue with SQL causes WebDeploy to fail can be a pain. This feature aims to offer support, hopefully including any SIF generated certificates

Remote Distributed Deployment – Instead of deploying on each and every machine in a scaled environment, this feature should allow a single point to deploy your environment from. This may require certain ports or networking enabled so check your security requirements to determine if this feature will work for you

Security Hardening – Traditionally you would create your own script to apply Sitecore’s Security Hardening best practices, or even go the manual route

Includes – For those from the “Development World”, this is exactly what it is… use of includes as part of SIF for custom components

Azure SQL – Shockingly, Sitecore does not have a SIF Deployment to Azure SQL developed yet. This is despite that the Shard Map Manager already has the capability to deploy from an IaaS VM to Azure SQL. We hope to get official instructions for deploying to Azure SQL when using SIF as a large amount of the community leverages Azure SQL for its backend