Best Practices for Deploying Bloomreach Experience Manager in Bloomreach Cloud

When deploying Bloomreach Experience Manager in Bloomreach Cloud, configure the following four environments:

dev or test
acceptance
blue
green

The blue and green environments are designated for production use. For details on this approach, see blue/green deployment. To test with production content on the acceptance environment, use the backup/restore functionality.

Use your own custom domains for blue/green deployments. Ensure you have a custom domain available to assign to your active environment (either blue or green). For HST-based websites, use a domain such as www.customername.com. For CMS access, use a separate domain like cms.customername.com.

Note: Do not use bloomreach.cloud domains for any workload other than dev/test. These domains cannot be detached and reattached to different environments.

For Single Page Applications (SPA) or Server-Side Rendering (SSR), define a custom domain such as prod.customername.com. Provide the SSL certificate and point the domain to the active production environment (blue or green). Use the set production procedure to mark the environment as production.

For the CMS, assign a custom domain such as cms.customername.com and direct it to the production CMS environment (blue or green).

For HST-based websites, use a domain like www.customername.com for the public site.

Do not use the CMS (sub)domain to access the site web application or delivery API. Always use separate (sub)domains (for example, cms.customername.com for the CMS and prod.customername.com for the public site). This separation ensures that public website availability is not impacted if CMS maintenance mode is enabled.

For guidance on performance testing, see marking an environment as Acceptance.

To optimize your Bloomreach Experience Manager implementation for deployment in Bloomreach Cloud, follow these best practices:

Do not store session data in the HttpSession. Session data will be lost if the platform scales down the number of site containers.
Avoid writing data to the repository from the website. Writing data complicates content freezes, which are required for Blue-Green Deployment and for backward incompatible upgrades. Ideally, the site should not store data in the content repository during content freezes. Either implement a mechanism to enable or disable this functionality at runtime, or avoid storing site-generated data in the repository. If storing data is necessary, prepare a script to migrate new data from the old to the new repository, and execute it after the blue-green deployment.
Keep the content repository and database small. Do not store large media files in the content repository. Use an external media service for large files.
Do not block the /cms/ping and /cms/ws/indexexport endpoints. Bloomreach Cloud requires access to these endpoints. For example, when configuring SSO, ensure these URLs are excluded from any restrictions.

Important Notice

All customers and partners must not provide access to Bloomreach products and services to employees, consultants, independent contractors, internal users, or affiliates located in Russia without legal authorization. Bloomreach does not currently block Russian IP addresses, but reserves the right to do so in the future. You may continue using Bloomreach products if you comply with these guidelines.