Identifying the Updates on SAP Commerce Cloud in the Public Cloud

With the latest updates, SAP Commerce Cloud offers you self-service capabilities to scale your capacity entitlements directly through the Cloud Portal, eliminating the need to rely on SAP Support. You can now granularly ramp up or dial down services within non-production environments by adjusting factors like the number of instances, CPU, and memory requirements. Specifically, you have the freedom to:

• Scale Database and Node Pools: Easily upsize your non-production environments to production size for performance and load testing or downsize to a minimal footprint for cost-saving purposes. This enhanced control ensures you can manage your environments as per your exact needs.
• Scale Service Resources: Manual scaling is now possible, allowing you to set resource limits, parameters, and base replica counts for individual services. This means you can allocate CPU resources to handle increased demand or scale back when demand decreases.

Please note, you'll need to have 1) a scalable, non-live, non-production environment, 2) available consumption credits (coming next), 3) hold the CUSTOMER_SYS_ADMIN role to manage the self-service scalable sandbox.

Consumption credits are available and sold as Capacity Units, enabling you to self-scale your non-production environments. This self-service mechanism brings more flexibility, and the provided Capacity Units Estimator helps you make informed decisions with estimates for scalable sandboxes.

Get deep insights into your storefront orders with comprehensive consumption reports (not consumption credits reports). These reports detailed order information and values, helping you to check if your business operations fit within the contracted limits with SAP. The reports can be accessed via the new cloud extension: ordermetricsbackoffice, and only users with consumption authority can access with read-write privileges in Backoffice.

Address issues swiftly without service disruption by leveraging the new self-service option to restart individual pods within your Kubernetes clusters. This feature lets you manage pod-specific concerns efficiently through the Cloud Portal.

Enhance your deployment strategy with canary deployments. This method is an extension to blue-green deployments, allowing you to progressively shift a percentage of live traffic to a new deployment. Once validated, you can seamlessly make this new deployment the primary one. Please note:

• Remember to purchase consumption credits to enable canary deployments
• Although this feature is available for both Staging and Production environments, it is only practical to use it on Staging if you want to practice the process.

More information can be found on the FAQ page about canary deployments.

New APIs have been introduced for scheduled activities, providing advanced management options:

• Managing Upgrades: Plan your environment upgrades conveniently using the scheduler feature in the Cloud Portal.
• Scheduling Disaster Recovery Upgrade: Schedule upgrades for your disaster recovery package efficiently to ensure minimal disruption.

The Private Link feature has been enhanced to facilitate secure connections between SAP Commerce Cloud and customer-owned Azure subscriptions. It's possible to create:

• a Private Link Endpoint to connect SAP Commerce Cloud endpoints to endpoints and services in a customer-owned Azure subscription. In addition: the newly increased endpoint limit now allows up to 25 endpoints per Commerce environment, extending from the previous cap of 5.
• a Private Link Service to connect endpoints in one or more customer-owned Azure subscription to SAP Commerce Cloud endpoints and services.

The Cloud Portal now supports secure sign-in using web-based two-factor authentication, in addition to time-based one-time passwords (TOTP). This update enhances user security during the authentication process.

Since the Microsoft Azure Storage Client SDK 8.6.6 will be replaced with selected Microsoft Azure Java Client 12.x libraries in by Q1 2025, the Cloud Hot Folders extension has been updated, and the new libraries are now available to facilitate the transition. You can check the details about the cloud hot folder extension here.

The backup and restore functionality of SAP Commerce Cloud now extends support to Azure SQL, Azure SQL Hyperscale, and PostgreSQL databases. This wider support ensures your data backup and restoration needs are comprehensively met.