Introduction

This document provides an overview of available systems in the Intershop Commerce Platform.

Glossary

References

• Reference - Intershop Commerce Platform - Operational FAQ (ICM 11+)

• Concept - Intershop Commerce Platform Synchronization Process

• Concept - Intershop Commerce Platform DevOps - Access and Permissions

Introduction

The Intershop Commerce Platform is a comprehensive system for digital commerce that incorporates essential B2B and B2C e-commerce functionalities, as well as AI-driven search and recommendations, PIM, CMS, order management, low-code integration, and a centralized data hub for AI and BI. It enables users to create unique customer experiences. It is based on a modern, service-based, API-first, cloud-native architecture and supports both headless and traditional commerce scenarios. 

Intershop provides the customer with the applications, infrastructure, and service operations for running the Intershop Commerce Platform.

The purpose of this document is to define the services with regards to:

• Requirements for services that will be provisioned for the customer

• Agreed service targets

• Criteria for target fulfilment evaluation

• Roles and responsibilities

• Supporting processes, limitations, and exclusions

DevOps System Overview

Depending on the selected Intershop subscription and options, the platform is based on multiple applications, such as Intershop Commerce Management (ICM), Intershop Order Management (IOM) and the Intershop Progressive Web App (PWA), as well as the Customer Engagement Center (CEC) and/or BI Data Hub.

Figure 1 Architecture Overview

The Intershop Commerce Platform is typically tailored to the customer’s specific needs in a separate software customization project. The customization project is implemented by an Intershop implementation partner or Intershop Professional Services.

To ensure the highest quality of the customer’s commerce solution, Intershop also provides non-production environments and DevOps tooling to support professional continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) processes.

The following table gives an overview of the different core environments and clusters provided to the customer depending on the subscribed options:

*The same code base is used for live and edit, but a different domain name and link to the ICM system.

Environment types:

• The PRODUCTION (PRD) environment is used for end customers and content editors.

• The USER ACCEPTANCE TEST (UAT) environment is intended for functional acceptance testing of new releases. It is typically initialized with pseudonymized production data to provide a realistic testing ground. However, it is important to note that this environment is optimized for a limited number of users and data (e.g., products or orders), ensuring comprehensive testing without excessive load or stress on the system as the infrastructure is not PRD-like. It is essential to highlight that UAT is not designed for load testing purposes.

• The INTEGRATION (INT) environment is used by the development teams for integration tests.

The following graphics show workflows and responsibilities for different processes and tools of our individual applications.

The next chapters give a more detailed overview of the CI/CD systems for the specific applications. 

Intershop Commerce Management (ICM)

ICM 11+ is based on containers and operated in a Kubernetes cluster. Custom container images are created during the build process based on Azure DevOps and stored in the container registry. The Helm-based deployment process is used to deploy container images to the non-production and production environments.

Intershop Progressive Web App (PWA)

The PWA reference source code is cloned into the Azure DevOps Git repository and can be freely customized. As the result of the build process, the container image is pushed to the container registry. The Helm deployment process can be triggered and the container image is pulled from the container registry and deployed into the namespaces of the non-production and production Kubernetes clusters.

Intershop Order Management (IOM) 

Custom IOM container images are created during the build process (left side) based on the IOM base images and pushed to the container registry. The Helm deployment process can be triggered and the container images are pulled from the container registry and deployed into the namespaces of the non-production and production Kubernetes clusters.