Deployment architecture

This section describes the logical and physical types of deployments. Use this information to plan the type of Sitecore Commerce deployments that you will install.

These architectures do not support a specific site, application, or scenario. They provide a reference that you can modify to meet a variety of business needs. Your actual deployment design will vary according to your resources and requirements. Sitecore Commerce provides several ways for you to scale a deployment. You can isolate and extend each functional area onto separate clusters/servers.

Understanding the logical design of a deployment is the first step in transforming your functional requirements and components into a physical design that you can deploy in your data center.

Conceptually, you can categorize the supported features in your deployment according to their functionality and relation to site data. Physically, you can deploy these features in separate environments. The recommended deployment scenario categorizes features into three functional design components: Development & QA, Content Management, and Content Delivery.

Development and QA

This tier is used for developers creating new functionality, QA testing the functionality, and the approved functionality being bundled in Sitecore packages and installed in the Content Management environment. In this environment, developers typically have all software installed on one machine, which makes the deployment and testing of solutions simpler and quicker. QA servers in this environment are typically of larger scale, so the solutions created are tested in a more realistic environment.

Content management

In this tier, content is created for the production website, and can be viewed and updated without being reflected on the public site. This environment is also used by content creators for acceptance testing of functionality that is created by developers. Content is pushed from this environment to the Content Delivery environment by Sitecore Publishing or Commerce Server Staging. Any packages created by developers will be manually installed on the delivery network servers.

Content delivery

In this tier, content is delivered to the public by publishing it from the Content Management environment. Content should never be edited directly in this environment. Multiple CD servers may be needed to handle load against this role, and some of the additional Sitecore roles may need to be turned off and moved onto different servers to avoid overconsumption of resources, such as CPU, memory, or disk.

This section of the documentation contains the following: