SAP Commerce Cloud 2211 release strategy has changed to adopt continuous innovation. In short, this new approach provides monthly updates. So Customer and/or Partner can take advantage of bringing new features to their commerce solutions as soon they have been released.
This article will highlight how to manage and operate this higher frequency update. In addition to this, you should take a look also at SAP Commerce Cloud Release Ready Kit for additional guidance.
When
This release strategy is particularly adapted for an Agile/Sprint approach. Every Sprint preparation should include a review of changes and new features included with each SAP Commerce Cloud release. New features are shipped once per quarter. Where improvements are shipped every month.
Every change for each release is described in this Feature Rollout Phases table.
For each new features, Customers/Partners have a 6 months window to adapt their solution to adopt the change/improvement. After this 6 months, the feature will be activated by default, Customers/Partners still have capacity to disable the feature if they’re not ready yet, but after a period of 1 year from the original feature release date, the feature will be activated with no possibility to disable it.
Pay attention, after a while, older versions reach end of maintenance are not supported. So you will no longer be able to create new builds in SAP Cloud Portal (but you can continue to deploy/run existing builds). Supported updated releases are indicated in official documentation here.
What
In this monthly update process, you have to consider two SAP products : SAP Commerce Cloud and SAP Composable Storefront. Both products are evolving together and updated monthly. Regarding SaaS products like SAP Cloud Portal, Intelligent Selling Services and SAP Emarsys, you don’t have to manage the matrix compatibility and release deployment. You will always be on the latest releases.
Be sure to evaluate all update changes and new features for your specific customer solution. You should first identify what extensions are activated in your solution and which of the new key features are applicable for you.
Then you can check the new release impact/scope for your solution by following these upgrade instructions.
How
Upgrade instructions should been applied to the solution, allowing Customers/Partners to activate the change/feature by enabling it through a feature flag property.
Each feature has its own property or flag to be activated and is described in Activating SAP Commerce Cloud Features
From a DevOps perspective, you can follow this approach.
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- Production environment has patched version 2211.n-2 deployed for business exploitation.
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- Where Staging environment has patched version 2211.n-1 deployed for qualification/validation.
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- And Development environment has patched version 2211.n deployed for adoption/adaption.
Each end of month should follow the above new release deployment best practices to stay current with each SAP Commerce 2211 monthly release update. It is important to stay current on releases to ensure solution efficiency. A delay could cascade unwanted incidents related to security, performance, or user experience.
Note that each environment on this release qualification has a specific role to play for ensuring the best delivery quality as possible for the business.
Concretely, to build your release candidate, you have to specify in manifest.json which version should be used. It is important to mention explicitly the patched version expected, otherwise latest version will be pick up automatically by Commerce Cloud Builder.
Please find in below an example
{
"commerceSuiteVersion": "2211.12",