Elastic Path Commerce Deployment Guideline
Elastic Path Commerce is available for cloud deployments on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. For more information, see:
Deployment Suggestions
The following suggestions apply to all deployments:
- To simplify management, tuning and monitoring of Web Apps (except for Cortex Studio), deploy each to a separate application server instance.
- Deploy the Cortex Studio Web App to the same application server as the Cortex Server to avoid CORS (Cross Origin Resource Sharing) issues.
note
Cortex Studio is typically deployed to test environments, as it is not required in production environments.
For more information on the Elastic Path Commerce the deployment package and artifacts that are supplied, see Deployment package structure.
Clustering and Scaling
The following Elastic Path Commerce components are listed along with optimization advice on how best to implement clustering and scaling to suit your installation.
Cortex Server
- The Cortex Server is sessionless and can be scaled horizontally behind a load balancer for availability and throughput.
- Auto-scaling may be used to handle peak volumes, based on your Elastic Path license terms.
Commerce Manager Server
The Commerce Manager Server is designed to be deployed with one active instance at any given time. These instances cannot be scaled horizontally, but your deployment environment should be configured to stand up a new instance if the active instance goes offline.
Server performance beyond 50 concurrent users per server may cause a reduction in performance.
The default session timeout is 4 hours.
This time is set to minimize impact on users that do not save changes due to unplanned interruptions.
Integration Server
- The Integration Server is sessionless, and can be scaled horizontally for availability.
- For most installations, 2 instances are enough. More than 2 are required with very high order volumes or extensive back-end integration processing.
- Use a load balancer when exposing web services through the Integration Server.
- When using a single instance, set it to automatically restart after a failure.
Batch Server
- The Batch Server is designed to be deployed with one active instance at any given time. These instances cannot be scaled horizontally, but your deployment environment should be configured to stand up a new instance if the active instance goes offline.
Search Server
The Search Server depends on the Solr Primary/Replica architecture. For configuration and management details, see Search Server Clustering.
The primary Search Server is designed to be deployed with one active instance at any given time. These instances cannot be scaled horizontally, but your deployment environment should be configured to stand up a new instance if the active instance goes offline.
The primary Search Server can be deployed to the same VM as the Batch Server for small installations or to a separate VM to handle larger catalogs.
Failure of the primary Search Server does not impact application availability.
For small installations, deploy a replica instance to each node that requires search functionality.
This works well for smaller installations, but may not scale for a large number of nodes or for very large catalogs. The overhead of replicating search indexes to multiple replicas needs to be weighed against deployment complexity.
Alternatively, deploy a pool of replicas behind a sessionless load balancer.
Data Sync Server
- The Data Sync Server is sessionless and can be scaled horizontally.
- For single instance installations, set this server to restart after a failure.
Apache ActiveMQ
- Apache ActiveMQ is required for all services except the Search Server.
- In production, implement one primary broker and one replica broker (in case the primary broker becomes unavailable).
- Monitor ActiveMQ as a core component.
- Other Java Message Service (JMS) implementations are not supported at this time.
Configuration
This section describes the major configuration points for deployment. See System Configuration for additional details.
The database connection and JMS (Java Messaging Service) broker are defined using JNDI.
For examples, see the
context.xml
files in thetomcat
directory of extensions web app modules.- The Commerce Database JDBC data source is defined by the
jdbc/epjndi
JNDI resource. - The JMS broker connection is defined by the
jms/JMSConnectionFactory
JNDI resource.
- The Commerce Database JDBC data source is defined by the
Application ports are defined using property files. See Configuring Environment Specific Settings.
Cortex is also configured using property files. See Cortex Configuration Files.
Additional application configuration is contained in the database. See Configuring System Settings.
The sync will introduce a new Commerce Target Database JDBC data source defined by the
jdbc/targetepjndi
JNDI resource.
System Properties
The following sections provides Java system properties can be provided on the command line at run time:
-Dep.asset.location
Used By: Integration
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/ASSETS/assetLocation
system setting.
-Dep.changesets.enabled
Used By: Commerce Manager, Import/Export
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/CHANGESETS/enable
system setting.
-Dep.smtp.host
Used By: Integration
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/EMAIL/mailHost
system setting.
-Dep.smtp.port
Used By: Integration
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/EMAIL/mailPort
system setting.
-Dep.smtp.scheme
Used By: Integration
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/EMAIL/smtpScheme
system setting.
-Dep.smtp.username
Used By: Integration
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/EMAIL/emailAuthenticationUser
system setting.
-Dep.smtp.password
Used By: Integration
Overrides COMMERCE/SYSTEM/EMAIL/emailAuthenticationPassword
system setting.
-Dep.search.default.url
Used By: All
Overrides the default value of the COMMERCE/SYSTEM/SEARCH/searchHost
system setting.
-Dep.search.master.url
Used By: Search master
Overrides the master context value of the COMMERCE/SYSTEM/SEARCH/searchHost
system setting.
-Dorg.eclipse.rap.rwt.enableUITests=true
Used By: Commerce Manager
Enables support for Commerce Manager Selenium testing. Disable for production, or there will be a performance impact.
-DenableTrustedSubjectHeaderMode
Used By: Cortex
Supports switching between OAuth2 authentication and Trusted Subject Header Mode authentication when starting Cortex.
For more information, see Cortex Authentication.
epdb.synctarget.username
Used By: Data Sync Server
User name is required by the Data Sync web application.
epdb.synctarget.password
Used By: Data Sync Server
Password name is required by the Data Sync web application.
epdb.synctarget.url
Used By: Data Sync Server
The Sync Target URL is required by the Data Sync web application.
epdb.synctarget.removeAbandonedTimeout
Used By: Data Sync Server
The Sync Target removeAbandonedTimeout is required by the Data Sync web application.
epdb.username
Used By: All
Elastic Path database user name.
epdb.password
Used By: All
Elastic Path database password.
epdb.url
Used By: All
Elastic Path database URL.
ep.jms.url
Used By: All
Elastic Path JMS URL.
ep.datasync.context
Used By: All
Properties that can be passed.
ep.datasync.port.http
Used By: All
Properties that can be passed.
ep.datasync.port.https
Used By: All
Properties that can be passed.
ep.datasync.tomcat.port.http
Used By: All
Properties that can be passed.
ep.datasync.tomcat.port.https
Used By: All
Properties that can be passed.
ep.tomcat.maxcachesize
Used By: All
Property that can be passed to all Elastic Path web applications.
Context Paths
The default application context paths are:
Web Application | Context Path |
---|---|
Batch Server | batch |
Cortex | cortex |
Cortex Studio | studio |
Commerce Manager | cm |
Search Server | searchserver |
Integration Server | integration |
Data Sync Server | datasync |
Additional JARs
Deployment of additional JARs to the application server depends on the database and JMS broker being used.
The deployment packages includes JARs in the following default directory locations:
- JDBC driver -
database/jdbc
- Active MQ JARs -
tools/activemq/lib