Commerce with cloud support

Since the start of 2014 we have been releasing updates to our platform using a continuous release cycle. This has allowed us to deliver many improvements and fixes to our platform, with a number of changes to the new catalog management user experience. We have also released an updated Service API for  easier integration to and consumption of commerce catalog data by other systems and services.

True cloud support for Commerce

True cloud support was introduced for CMS 7.5 and took full advantage of public commercial cloud services like Azure Service Bus and BLOB Storage as well as AWS SQS and S3. In addition,  the introduced support for pure XCOPY installations of CMS instances allowed for seamless elastic scaling. Now all this is available for EPiServer Commerce as well!

Note: The technology changes made to support this causes an increment in the major version number to 8 to follow semantic versioning. Please check the overview below to see if and how it might affect your solution.

The technology changes include:

• SQL Server Full Text Search is removed due to SQL Azure compliance, Commerce Manager search now uses the search provider.
• References to EPiServer Common Framework are removed to ensure SQL Azure compliance. If Commerce tags, ratings and comments are used, documented changes must be made to continue using this feature. This feature is not currently compatible with deployments into elastic scale cloud environments.
• NET 4.5 support across the platform.
• Current Catalog web service has been superseded by the Service API.

If EPiServer solutions are deployed into cloud environments, the following components cannot currently be deployed:

• CMS workflows based on WWF
• CMS Mirroring
• CMO
• Relate
• EPiServer Mail
• ImageVault

These products continue to function as today in on-premise and IaaS environments.

Related information

• Release notes
• Deploying Commerce to Azure
• Migrating Commerce databases to Azure
• Deploying Commerce to Amazon
• Migrating Commerce databases to Amazon
• Breaking changes in Commerce 8
• EPiServer continuous release process

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