Overview

This article provides guidance to support your migration project planning. If you haven't already done so we recommend you begin with our article Migrate to SAP Commerce Cloud, which covers many of the fundamentals of migrating your solution to SAP Commerce Cloud.

Table of Contents

Planning

Planning Considerations

Each customer situation could be different in terms of complexity. While we have outlined a simple migration below, we will also look at some aspects that may change the considerations which need to be taken into account.

Upgrade or Fresh Implementation of Commerce Cloud

There could be situations where the effort to upgrade to an acceptable release level prior to migration could be commercially unacceptable. In such scenarios, it may be worth considering a fresh implementation of the end solution in SAP Commerce Cloud instead of following the traditional Upgrade & Migration path. In such scenarios, project teams have leveraged existing code by “lift and shift” of the reusable code.

Upgrade and Migrate in a single go-live?

The timeline to complete an upgrade project and then a migration project could be unacceptable in some cases. With the two activities running in parallel in a single project, one can combine the testing activities to pull back the go-live date and compress the timeline. Obviously, this may increase the complexity and effort in terms of co-ordination and testing troubleshooting for the delivery team.  

Number of Data centres

For multi-national companies, which operate across different time zones, it may become necessary to deploy the solution in different data centres. The driving forces for this decision could include consideration of data security/privacy across country borders, language, and system responsiveness to the end-users across the globe from a single data centre. At a minimum, cut-over and go-live support across different time zones will have to be factored in.

Number of code bases – Current vs Future

A customer may have multiple code bases catering to different regions, markets, etc. As a part of the digital transformation, decisions will have to be taken regarding whether to keep the code bases as they are, or to consolidate them, or break up them up.

Continuity of Business As Usual during the implementation period

The overall business needs may dictate how much individual businesses teams may be able to comply to a code freeze. This will have an impact on the project complexity and timeline. The code freeze options during migration/upgrade are outlined at Migrate to SAP Commerce Cloud: Code Freeze Options for Upgrade and Migration.  

Milestone planning 

Below you can find an example of a milestone plan for an SAP Commerce Cloud migration.

In this example, three environments are considered: development (DEV), staging (STG) and production (PROD). However, additional environments are available on demand and can extend your project's scope, depending on your SAP Commerce Cloud contract.

Milestone Description

Must-do's and highlights of the above milestones include the following:

To understand the migration process in more detail, please consult the following video: SAP Commerce Cloud: Migration Strategies

Environmental Planning

A default setup in SAP Commerce Cloud has three environments: development, staging, and production, you can request additional environments in SAP Commerce Cloud.

When it comes to project planning consider how you might parallelize activities.

Consider the following while planning the dependencies:

1. Define how many environments have to be migrated
2. Define how one environment differs from another (e.g. DEV1 and DEV2 might be an exact copy incl. database. Therefore you might consider migrating the first environments and then using a snapshot, rather than performing two separate data migrations)
3. Define quality gates (e.g. DEV1 and DEV2 to be closed off before STG1 is going to be migrated)
4. Define critical path for sign-off (e.g. DEV1, STG2 (UAT), PRD1)
5. Consider doing parallel development activities

The diagram below shows an example of parallelized activities in several environments to a very high-level, with the following considerations:

• The environments in scope from lower to higher are: DEV1, DEV2, STG1, STG2 and PRD1
• DEV1 and DEV2 are identical, used for different scopes
• DEV1, DEV2 and STG1 have no dependencies on each other
• STG1 is the integration testing environment
• It is mandatory that STG1 is fully tested before STG2 can be tested
• STG2 has a similar configuration to STG1, with some amendments
• STG2 is the environment dedicated to UAT
• A successful UAT is the mandatory quality gate before the PRD1 go live

Which environment to build first is up to you, however building and testing Production and replicating down to lower environments may prove quicker.

Conclusion

This article provided you with the resources to understand how you can embark on a migration to the new SAP Commerce Cloud. You should now be familiar with the overall approach for migrating your commerce solution, the steps you can take on your own (or with a partner) as well as the steps that require SAP involvement. Although the article tries to answer many of the questions we are asked, there will always be specific scenarios that may need more clarification. If this is the case or you are interested in starting a migration, please consult with your Account Executive, Customer Success Partner or reach out to sapcx-services@sap.com.