Blog posts by Configured Commerce

Blog posts by Configured Commerce - Technical Topics2024-05-10T15:55:39.0000000Zhttps://world.optimizely.com/blogs/configured-commerce---technical-topics/ Optimizely World Configured Commerce - Infrastructure Updates Ahoy!I'm very happy to share an important milestone - we no longer have any customers in our legacy v1 environment!  This means that the Configured Commerce services and SRE teams are going to be moving forward with some changes now that all customers are hosted in Kubernetes, whether it's AWS (v2) or Azure (v3).  We are still working to migrate our v2 customers to v3, and please reach out to your CSM if you have not heard about this yet, but we're going to be making some changes to how things work under the hood (and they're all good!) First and foremost, as we unify our customers' hosting environments from an infrastructure perspective, we have identified that there are disparate versions of SQL Server compatibility in different customer environments.  This isn't ideal - we want our partners to be confident they can make changes across all of the customer environments with the same SQL functionality.  With that being said, we will be updating customer production environments on Monday, May 27 to utilize the most recent SQL Server compatibility version.  For v2, that is SQL Server 2019 Compatibility Version (150).  For v3, that is SQL Server 2022 Compatibility Version (160).  Customers who migrate from v2 to v3 will be upgraded to compat version 160. This change is already live in customer sandboxes and has been for two weeks.  I know it's a bit of a surprise to hear that now, but if you haven't had any issues (or even awareness), that met our goal for the impact of these changes being completely silent. Secondly, we've had some customers request that we update our issuer values for our identity tokens.  Currently, they list 'locahost' as the issuer.  We will be making a change in early June to make these be the canonical domain for the instance (customername.insitesofthosting.com in production and customername.commerce.insitesandbox.com in lower environments.) This change is already live in customer sandboxes and has been for two weeks.  This change is potentially more impactful than the SQL Server compatibility version, so if you have custom SSO functionality, please test it in your sandbox environment and open a support ticket if there are any issues. Last, we're updating our license server to use the same Kubernetes hosting as our customer websites and putting it behind Cloudflare (also like customer websites).  This will not affect customers in cloud in any way - but for our SDK-hosted customers, you may need to update any IP Whitelists.  We will be making this change on Friday, May 31, 2024 and will be reaching out directly to all SDK customers directly to inform you of the new IP. These aren't major, groundbreaking version updates, but I'm very happy for these QOL updates to go live and to better unify all of our environments for our customers and partners.2024-05-10T15:55:39.0000000Z

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Configured Commerce - .NET Has Arrived!Configured Commerce - .NET Has Arrived! Winter is my least favorite time of the year.  All my cohorts in Sweden know what we deal with here in Minnesota - frigid temperature, heaps of snow, and old cars that just won't start up.  It has already been below freezing several times this year, and we're only looking at colder and colder temperatures as the sun hangs lower in the sky. At least I have the warm glow of my computer screens to keep me warm, especially as they come with a major change to how our platform is built: .NET (formerly .NET Core).  Note that I will be referring to the new .NET as “.NET” for the rest of this article, and the legacy version as “.NET Framework.” Today, Configured Commerce is built on top of .NET Framework 4.8, the legacy version of this architecture that runs only on Windows.  .NET is a platform-agnostic infrastructure that inherits quite a bit from .NET Framework's functionality while providing significant boosts in performance and flexibility. Our November release is slated to be the first that supports .NET builds (in Beta) and allows for partners and customers to build their extensions project with the new, fun toys. So, what does this mean for Configured Commerce customers? This release is not intended for Production consumption This is a beta release of .NET for Configured Commerce.  It includes full support to build projects with .NET extensions and Linux containers in the hosted environment, but we are expecting many bugs to be found.  Optimizely will provide dockerfiles for local builds as a part of the release, so partners will be able to immediately jump in and start building projects against this code. The .NET release is as backwards compatible as possible While I expect that partners will need to make some changes to their extensions code related to deprecated or changed functionality in .NET versus .NET Framework, the Optimizely engineering team has already tested against Optimizely Expert Services-implemented customers as a part of this building process and have had positive results there regarding the amount of necessary rework. .NET 8 is Coming! I chose an auspicious day to announce this ahead of this week's release, as .<a href="https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download/dotnet/8.0">NET 8 has just moved to full release</a> as I am writing this (November 14, 2023).  We intend to move this implementation to .NET 8 as quickly as possible, as it is the LTS (Long Term Support) version for .NET, with support through 2026.  Changes for .NET 7 vs .NET 8 are expected to be minimal and production implementations for customers will likely be in .NET 8 vs .NET 7. When will .NET be available for production consumption? Partners should be able to start building against .NET immediately upon the November release.  Optimizely will need to take the bugs and other concerns raised by our partner network for this release into consideration before we talk about a truly production-ready General Availability.  Best-case, this is the December (2312) release, as our team is already working through most of the internally-discovered bugs. What Does .NET get me? This is the important question.  .NET provides some performance improvements in the application itself, with faster API calls across the board, but it also provides the biggest potential improvements with the hosting environment.  .NET is platform agnostic, so unlike .NET Framework, it can run on Linux Kubernetes containers.  Linux containers are lighter weight than Windows containers, can be spun up more quickly, and in the future, will be included in autoscaling for the Configured Commerce application. Wait, Autoscaling?! Yes, while it will not yet be available in the beta release, we intend to implement autoscaling in environments for horizontal scaling (more replicas) against increasing traffic load.  I'll be ready to talk more about this when I have more data available and can present a comprehensive plan regarding how autoscaling will work. Will I be forced to upgrade to .NET from .NET Framework? We are not force-migrating customers.  However, once our partner network has begun to get their hands on the code and provide us with feedback, we will determine a future version in which extensions can only be built against .NET, not .NET Framework.  This means that .NET Framework support will be limited to versions of Configured Commerce up to that point, and no versions released after that.  This is likely to be in the second half of 2024, based on the information known today, but this is subject to change. So how do I get started? If you're already interested in .NET - talk to your implementation partner about reviewing your custom extensions as they begin their testing .NET.  We will make an announcement (and it will be in release notes) when we have .NET in GA. It has been a long journey to get .NET as the underlying architecture for this application.  I expect that the changes to reliability and speed will delight you as much as they do me.2023-11-15T16:39:14.0000000Z

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Configured Commerce - Introduction to Long-Term Support (LTS) ReleasesFirst off, for those who have not had a chance to meet me yet, my name is John McCarroll, and I am the Technical Product Manager for the Optimizely Commerce team.  I work with our Engineering and Product Management teams to provide guidance on technical topics as they pertain to the future of our commerce products.  I’m also the direct Product Manager for Mission Control, which supports deployments, infrastructure, and observability for Configured Commerce. With our October release, for the first time we will be offering our Long-Term Support release on Configured Commerce.  Find below a small FAQ about this feature. Optimizely is still on the path forward to true versionless SaaS with externally-hosted extensions for Configured Commerce, but we recognize the need for some customers looking to have more predictability with upgrades in the meantime as we tackle this large project. Please also find our user-facing documentation on LTS and STS releases <a href="https://support.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/19456407554317">here</a> and our developer documentation <a href="https://docs.developers.optimizely.com/configured-commerce/docs/long-term-support-and-short-term-support-branches">here</a>.  What is Long-Term Support (LTS)? This is an exciting evolution of our current release structure, where customers who are looking to take a longer-supported branch that will accept hotfixes for its entire four-month release cycle, rather than the one-month cycle for our Short-Term Support monthly releases. Long-Term Support branches will also inherit the features of the previous STS release.  This means when we publish our October release, currently slated for October 19, we will release 5.1.2310.nnnn+STS (our monthly, Short-Term Support release), and 5.1.2309.nnnn+LTS (our thrice-yearly Long-Term Support Release). In January, we will formalize the regular cadence of January/May/September LTS releases.  This gives an LTS branch a lifespan of four months. The LTS cut in October will have a three-month lifespan in which to receive hotfixes before we move to the standard four-month cadence. How do I implement a Long-Term Support release? Like any release today – the Versioninfo.yaml file that lives in your Github Repository that contains your extensions code allows you to designate a version to be deployed.  To deploy your desired version, simply add the version number of the release you’d like to this configuration file and deploy that code. Can I swap between LTS and STS releases, if there’s a new feature I want in the STS release? Yes, with the same caveat that you have today – your version number must increase when you implement a new version.  Optimizely Configured Commerce does not support downgrades of code versions, and this new release structure is no different.  You can swap from 5.1.2309.nnnn+LTS to 5.1.2310.nnnn+STS, but you cannot take the reverse path – version numbers must go up.  IMPORTANT NOTE: This means you will need to wait until the next LTS release to return to the Long-Term Support versions. Is LTS right for my Configured Commerce implementation? Customers who are interested in staying up to date with the latest features will not want to shift to LTS releases. The iterative release cycle for Configured Commerce means that customers who want to be on the leading edge of their development should continue to take STS releases that contain desired features as soon as they are released. However, customers with high-complexity customizations or customers looking for additional predictability into their upgrade scheduling may want to select the LTS releases.  LTS provides additional predictability to the release cycle by spacing it out, but that comes at the cost of new feature functionality only being released three times a year. We recommend having this conversation with your implementation partner, as well.  Your partner will shed additional insight on how these versions will impact your current release cadence.2023-09-29T14:45:02.0000000Z

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