Unica- A Cloud Native Marketing Platform

Why Unica Cloud-Native?

We are in the midst of an information technology revolution driven by the cloud. The emergence of containers, with their fast startup, standardized application packaging, and isolation model, is further contributing to efficiency and agility.

Along with the benefits of Docker like reducing hardware resource costs, ease-of-use, portability, scalability, and modularity of deployments, Kubernetes provides container-orchestration capabilities for automating application deployment (rollout and rollbacks), workload scaling, and high availability. Helm charts leverage Kubernetes packages to streamline the installation and management of applications deployed on Kubernetes.

1. Faster release pace 
Unica Docker Images will be rolled out for each release and/or fix pack. Time to market has become the key differentiator between the most innovative organizations and their lagging competition. With this deployment approach, Unica can build and ship more value to its customers. With this deployment approach, it is very easy for customers to consume new releases.

2. Better CX
HCL Unica will ship Docker Images with new features faster and keep iterating continuously. An extensive set of APIs in the Unica Products would enable integrations with enterprise data stores. Overall, Cloud-native applications allow you to improve your customer experiences.

3. Ease of Application management
Cloud-native also has many options to make infrastructure management effortless. With helm charts, application management, monitoring, deployments will be easy, automated, and configuration driven.

4. Reduced cost through containerization
Containers make it easy to manage and secure applications independently of the infrastructure that supports them. The industry is now consolidating around Kubernetes for the management of these containers at scale. Alongside Kubernetes, there’s a host of powerful cloud-native tools and standardization of infrastructure and tooling. This, along with open-source technologies, drives down costs. Pricing flexibility models are all enabled with a cloud-native deployment approach.

5. Building Reliable systems
With modern cloud-native approaches like Kubernetes in the cloud, you can more easily build applications to be fault-tolerant with resiliency and self-healing built-in. Because of this design, even when failures happen, you can easily isolate the impact of the incident, so it doesn’t take down the entire application. Instead of servers and monolithic applications, cloud-native microservices helps you achieve higher uptime and thus further improve the user experience.

6. Deploy Anywhere
Unica solutions can be deployed on any cloud. Unica can be deployed on Managed Kubernetes Clusters, e.g., EKS, GKE, AKS, etc.

How to Deploy Unica Cloud-Native Solution:
Firstly, you should get a helm chart from HCL and then configure the configMap YAML files. Each Unica product has an allied configuration file.

Before you begin

• Download unica docker Images from Flexnet.
• Import Docker Images, tag & push them to a docker registry.
• Edit values.yaml – product image URL in the repository section and tag numbers in the “tag” section.
• Update Database & AppServer details in the helm chart configMap files for each product.
• Update Persistent Volume Claim details, edit pvc.yaml in the helm chart.
• For an upgrade, you can refer to Upgrading on-premise applications to docker.

Procedure

These are the few steps to follow while deploying unica cloud-native solution.

• kubectl apply -f ./unica/extra-configs/local-pv.yaml
• helm install –name nginx stable/nginx-ingress -f ./unica/extra-configs/nginx-conf.yaml
• helm install hcl unica -f ./unica/values-local.yaml unica –set service.hostname=`hostname` –set service.applicationDomain=’com’ –set ingress.enabled=true

Unica Helm Release

Verifying your Deployed Helm Release

To verify your Unica Helm installation, you can always follow the link- Verifying the charts.

The advantages that come handy with the new Unica cloud-native platform is deployments have become easier, and even you can deploy in minutes and upgrade in a few hours. It also supports on-prem, cloud with Docker, Kubernetes, and Helm technologies. To learn more about it, you can have a read of #UNICAisDockerized