Tridion Sites technical overview

In its simplest form, Tridion Sites can be said to consist of a management side and a delivery side. On both sides are multiple servers, databases, and clients and APIs.

Tridion Sites is based on a modular, service-oriented architecture that is flexible and scalable. Open interfaces allow for easy integration with third-party applications.

The following diagram illustrates decoupled architecture with the management and delivery environments separated from one another both architecturally and physically:

Content management side

On the content management side of Tridion Sites:

Content Manager
Content Manager is the environment for creating, managing and assembling content. Users create content using various Content Manager clients and this content is stored in the Content Manager database.
Topology Manager
Topology Manager forms the bridge between the Content Manager and Content Delivery environments. Topology Manager maps logical publishing targets selected by the end user to physical publishing destinations on the presentation environments. Each Content Manager environment has its own Topology Manager instance and Topology Manager database.

Authors and editors can publish content to multiple Content Delivery environments. A typical setup will have one Content Delivery environment behind the firewall (the "staging" environment) and another outside it (the "live" environment).

Content delivery side

In short, Content Delivery is the conduit for the flow and deployment of published content to one or more delivery platforms. Content Delivery handles and processes content published from Content Manager, transforms the content into dynamic web content, stores the published content in the Content Data Store (a file system, a relational database, custom storage media, or a combination of these), and puts the content on the Presentation Server, the machine that serves content to web application users.

The Content Delivery environments and the presentation environments (that is, your web applications and websites) can be physically separate from each other. The presentation environments only need to contain the Content Interaction Libraries (CILs for short), which in turn only require a compatible version of .NET or Java. The CILs don't require any specific web and application servers, third-party libraries, nor do they connect to the Content Delivery databases.

The Content Delivery microservices, also called Content Interaction Services, are the server-side components of Content Delivery.

Content Delivery also exposes its functionality through a number of Capabilities, which Topology Manager can discover by interacting with the service endpoint of the Discovery Service.

Additional product features can introduce additional server-side software components, clients, databases and so on.

Decoupled architecture

When a user publishes content from the Content Delivery to a Content Delivery environment over an HTTP(S) protocol, the content can be then transformed into pieces of content in any format, ready for dynamic assembly and distribution on the Content Delivery side. Because the Content Delivery environments cannot access the Content Delivery database directly, sensitive information is protected. Additionally, the decoupled architecture allows for independent scaling and maintenance of each part of the platform, reducing hardware and maintenance costs.

The Tridion Sites architecture also decouples the technology stacks used in each environment. For example. the content management environment using Microsoft Windows and .NET technology can be perfectly paired with a technology stack using Microsoft Windows, Unix, or Linux in combination with Java in the Content Delivery environment.

Cross-environment, cross-platform integration framework

Tridion Integration Framework is the primary integration point for Tridion Sites to consume data and content that is external to the system. The framework provides a high degree of flexibility for your Tridion implementation and supports Connectors that can be:
  • Used with both Content Management and Content Delivery
  • Written either in Java or C# (.NET Core)

The framework also supports multiple ways for users to access content, including the Public Content API.