WebSphere Commerce environments

WebSphere Commerce has different environments that must be accounted for when you plan your WebSphere Commerce site architecture. These environments include your production, staging, authoring, and development environments. These environments can all be on the same, or different, operating systems.

Production server

The production server environment is the live environment that is open for business and accessible to customers.

Staging server

The WebSphere Commerce staging server is a part of the production environment where business and technical users can update and manage store data and preview changes. After users verify changes on the staging server, the changes can be propagated to the production server. By using the staging server, users can prepare, update, and preview changes while isolated from the live store or site on the production server. This separation allows users to avoid any impact to customers, such as incorrect information or unexpected behavior while customers browse store pages.

The staging environment requires you to configure the WebSphere Commerce instance as a staging server when you create the instance. You cannot convert a WebSphere Commerce production server environment to a staging server environment.

Quality Assurance server

A quality assurance (QA) server can be used for testing and previewing changes in a non-staging environment before you propagate to production.

Authoring server (workspaces)

The authoring server environment is an instance of WebSphere Commerce that consists of a staging server with workspaces enabled. Workspaces provide isolated access-controlled work areas in which you can make and preview changes to managed assets without affecting managed assets and users outside the area. The data in a workspace is kept in a separate database schema until the data is committed to the production-ready data on the authoring server.

The authoring server environment requires you to configure the WebSphere Commerce instance as a staging server and enable workspaces when you create the instance. You cannot convert a production instance to an authoring server instance.

Development

The development environment is used to customize parts of WebSphere Commerce and unit test any changes. The development environment must be installed on a separate system from the WebSphere Commerce server.

This development environment is provided with the WebSphere Commerce Developer product only.

Introduced in Feature Pack 2

WebSphere Commerce search

WebSphere Commerce Search can be deployed:
  • On the same machine as the WebSphere Commerce production server; this configuration is the standard configuration.
  • On a separate machine from the WebSphere Commerce production server; this configuration is the advanced configuration.
For more information about WebSphere Commerce search deployment scenarios, see Deploying the search server.

Introduced in Feature Pack 3With a staging server, you can manage the master index on the staging server and replicate the index to WebSphere Commerce Search server or servers in the production environment. For more information about using the index management utility on the staging server, see Replicating and propagating the search index.

Introduced in Feature Pack 3If you do not install a staging server, you can manage the master index on your QA server environment and replicate the index to the WebSphere Commerce search server in the production environment. For more information, see Indexing without staging propagation.

In the development environment, WebSphere Commerce Search runs with the WebSphere Commerce server in an embedded configuration.