Businesses are expected to be available around the clock to meet customer needs and market challenges, but the only way to effectively achieve these goals is by ensuring that the company’s digital commerce solution is humming along like a well-oiled machine. An ITIC study showed that 81% of its survey participants indicated a loss of over $300,000 due to downtime, while large enterprises suffered losses of over $5 million. Updates are a critical part of competitive in the marketplace and maintaining software infrastructure. However, updates are also a headache, a system-wide update can result in significant downtime.
Updating a digital commerce solution does not need to be an all-or-nothing proposition. The UltraServe team understands how critical updates are to supporting the health of enterprises. It has implemented a way to decrease system downtime while improving the digital commerce solution infrastructure via rolling updates. How can the deployment of rolling updates support enterprise success?
Get the ball rolling
Usually, traditional software updates involve taking the application servers completely offline. This allows developers to install the upgrades and run tests to ensure that the updates work as they should. Traditional updates do not always run smoothly, and a bug in an update can result in significant downtime for a business. Rolling updates, however, sidestep the issues with traditional updates. Deploying a rolling update means that a system upgrade is managed in phases, with a server (or subset of servers) getting the updated program first. This ensures that there is no need for a system-wide restart. Rolling deployments offer three main benefits:
- Zero-downtime to a digital commerce site. Perhaps the most important aspect of deploying rolling updates for a digital commerce solution is the impact on the application’s downtime. Without access to a digital commerce companies website, customers cannot make purchases or engage with representatives, and employees cannot execute their duties, such as processing orders or managing inventory. However, since only one server (or a few servers) is updated at any stage in the updating process, other parts of the digital commerce platform will be unaffected, allowing customers to interact with the business and employees to manage mission-critical tasks.
- Highly automated, lower resource requirements. Since the rolling deployment focuses on implementing an isolated update or limited series of updates, developers only need to concentrate on a restricted set of functionalities; this frees up developers to deliver higher levels of service for the specific updates. In addition, since there is no need to take down all of the servers simultaneously to perform the updates, fewer resources are needed at any given part of the rolling deployment to support the modifications in the system. The business can leverage those resources for other, high-value tasks.
- Seamless deployment of customer experience updates. Rolling updates effortlessly to ensure that the business’s customer experience is relatively frictionless, with little or no interruption. The entire digital commerce system can be updated in simple phases, without impacting user access with issues that may possibly arise in other parts of the platform. Customers continue to interact with the business while enjoying the benefits of the improved software platform.
Deploying rolling updates serves businesses by ensuring that your site has little to no downtime for customers to continue to transact business with no interrupted user experience. Most digital commerce platform services cannot successfully manage rolling deployments. The experienced team at UltraServe has been delivering scalable digital solutions for almost 20 years and has successfully managed rolling deployments. With its deep knowledge of Hybris, the team manages mission-critical commerce applications in the cloud, so businesses can focus on growing, not wrangling with their software solution. Contact the UltraServe team today to attain the time and resource savings of rolling deployments.