Bloomreach Experience Manager Implementation Best Practices for Deployment in Bloomreach Cloud

In Bloomreach Cloud, create the following four environments:

• dev or test
• acceptance
• blue
• green

The blue and green environments serve production purposes, seeblue/green deployment for more information. Usebackup/restore functionality to test with production content on acceptance.

We recommend using your own domains for blue/green deployments. Make sure you have a custom domain you can attach to your active environment (blue or green). For regular HST-based websites use a domain likewww.customername.com and for CMS access you can usecms.customername.com.
Note: Please do not usebloomreach.cloud domains for any workload other than dev/test as these domains cannot be detached and attached to different environments.

For an SPA/SSR, define a custom domain likeprod.customername.com,provide the certificate, and point the domain to the production environment, either blue or green. You can useset production to do so.

For the CMS define a custom domain likecms.customername.com and point the domain to the production cms, either blue or green.

For regular HST-based websites, it is similar; use a domain likewww.customername.com.

Do not use the CMS (sub)domain to access the site webapp / delivery API. Always use different (sub)domains (e.g.cms.customername.com andprod.customername.com) to ensure public availability of your website(s) is not affected whenCMS maintenance mode is enabled.

For performance testing, please seemarking an environment as Acceptance.

Optimize your Bloomreach Experience Manager implementation project for deployment in Bloomreach Cloud by following best practices:

• Donot store session data in the HttpSession. If you do, this data will get lost when the platform scales the number of site containers down.
• If the website writes data to the repository, this makes content freezes difficult. Content freezes are necessary when you need to do a Blue-Green Deployment, which is necessary for abackward incompatible upgrade. So ideally the site does not store any data in the content repository during content freezes. Either by implementing the option to disable/enable this functionality at run-time or avoid storing data generated by the site in the repository altogether. If storing data in the repository is needed, write a script that can migrate the new data from the old to the new repository. Execute this script after the blue-green deployment.
• Keep the content repository and database small - don't store large media files in the content repository. Instead, integrate with a dedicated external media service.
• Do not block the /cms/ping and the /cms/ws/indexexport end points. Bloomreach Cloud needs these endpoints to function. For example, when you configure SSO, exclude these URLs.

Important Notice

We expect that all of our customers and partners regardless of where they are located in the world will not provide access to Bloomreach products and services to their employees/consultants/independent contractors, internal users, or affiliates located in Russia without legal authorization. While we are not currently employing any IP block on the Russian IP addresses of users within the Bloomreach platform, we reserve the right to do so in the future. In summary, you can continue using Bloomreach products provided that the previous guidelines are observed.