Navigating the Future with Sitecore Experience Edge

Over the last few years, a lot has changed in the digital experience management landscape in general, and specifically within Sitecore. We are collectively embracing an agile new technical space where the tools available to us are being refined at a pace far beyond anything we’ve ever experienced before. This brings unique opportunities, as well as unique challenges, to us. In this article, we will introduce a tool designed to maximize these opportunities while providing a level of stability that is sorely needed in this ever-expanding space.

Sitecore Experience Edge is the content repository that sits between your content management infrastructure and your public website experience. In traditional monolithic Sitecore implementations, content is moved (“published”) from one SQL database to another, traditionally from “master” to “web.” This underlying publishing mechanism is the foundation that allows content editors to draft content and publish it when ready. But realistically, SQL databases are not the ideal storage medium for content, and this layer introduces potential problems in performance, scalability and security. Experience Edge represents a better way for the modern platform.

So, what exactly is it? It is a high-performance content delivery platform designed from the ground up for one explicit mission: to place your content in an easily digestible format on the edge network (CDN) to allow for fast, secure, native access. It eliminates the traditional Content Delivery (CD) servers in your Sitecore topology, which reduces complexities, security risks and performance bottlenecks. Below, we will break down exactly how it accomplishes each of these objectives.

As demonstrated in the diagram above, the primary focus of the Experience Edge delivery platform is to separate the content management (CM) role from the delivery of the services that ultimately provide content delivery services to the client browser. Let's review the top four reasons why this is highly advantageous in a modern headless implementation: