Recommended Practices

Optimizely's recommended tools and architectural patterns are engineered for maximum performance and seamless scalability within the DXP PaaS environment.

• Search and Navigation: Using Optimizely Search and Navigation (built on Azure Cognitive Search) instead of a custom Lucene.NET implementation delivers a managed, highly scalable, and performant search solution that integrates directly with CMS content while offloading all operational complexity.
• Digital Asset Management: Storing media assets in Azure Blob Storage provides elastic scalability, global CDN-backed content delivery, and high durability compared to storing files directly on web servers.

Adhering to recommended practices creates a codebase that is easier to understand, maintain, and evolve over the lifetime of the project.

• Standardization: Your code aligns with common Optimizely architectural patterns, making it easier for other developers familiar with the platform to contribute, review, and troubleshoot.
• Simplified Upgrades: Optimizely's upgrade paths - for example, .NET runtime upgrades or CMS version changes - assume recommended architectural structures. Deviating significantly can introduce expensive refactoring at every upgrade cycle.

Recommended practices incorporate built-in security features and align with established cloud security standards, reducing the surface area you need to defend yourself.

• Managed Services: Leveraging Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Blob Storage means inheriting enterprise-grade security controls - automated patching, threat detection, and access management - without building them yourself.
• Authentication: Following Optimizely guidance around OpenID Connect (OIDC) enables modern identity integration for both CMS editors and site users, aligned with cloud security standards.

Custom-built solutions may appear cheaper initially, but the total cost of ownership over time typically favors platform-aligned approaches.

• Managed Infrastructure: The PaaS model removes the burden of server management, operating system maintenance, and infrastructure scaling entirely from your team's backlog.
• Reduced Development Time: Pre-built integrations and optimized services allow teams to deliver features faster with significantly less custom infrastructure work.
• Resource Optimization: Recommended configurations are tuned for efficient cloud resource usage, improving operational cost predictability and reducing unexpected billing surprises.

Staying within the recommended stack gives you access to a rich ecosystem of documentation, community expertise, and official support channels that custom approaches cannot match.

• Official Documentation: Extensive guidance on docs.developers.optimizely.com focuses primarily on recommended patterns, with worked examples and reference implementations.
• Community Knowledge: Optimizely World hosts a large developer community sharing patterns, troubleshooting strategies, and reusable solutions - all aligned with recommended practices and therefore directly applicable to your work.
• Platform Support: Optimizely's support teams are best positioned to diagnose and resolve issues arising from recommended configurations. Custom deviations significantly narrow the scope of supportable assistance.

Optimizely's ecosystem tools are designed to work together seamlessly within the DXP platform. Assembling equivalent capability from scratch is typically complex and resource-intensive.

• DXP Services: Experimentation, personalization, and analytics integrate directly with CMS content and delivery pipelines. Each of these would require significant custom engineering to replicate outside the recommended stack - with no guarantee of the same depth of CMS integration.

Recommended practices allow developers to focus on delivering business value instead of maintaining custom infrastructure or unsupported integrations.

• Focus on Innovation: Developers spend more time building product features and less time maintaining foundational infrastructure - a compounding advantage as projects mature.
• Stay Current: Optimizely continuously evolves its recommended stack to leverage new cloud capabilities and industry standards, meaning teams that follow the recommended path automatically benefit from platform improvements.