This section describes the strategy for upgrading one or more colonies in a sharded deployment, without upgrading all the colonies. In a sharded environment, multiple colonies can run on multiple versions of Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation. This enables you to maintain different enterprises on different versions of Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation. For example, you can deploy colony 1 on Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation Release 9.4, and colonies 2 and 3 on Release 9.3. The enterprise in colony 1 runs on Release 9.4, and the enterprises in colonies 2 and 3 run on Release 9.3. All the enterprises in colonies 2 and 3 maintain their own separate transaction/master data. However, because enterprises on the same version of Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation can share configuration and statistical data with each other, the enterprises in colonies 2 and 3 share configuration and statistical data.
In this example, the colony-by-colony upgrade strategy can be either used to upgrade colony 1 to Release 9.4, or used in the future to upgrade colonies 2 and 3 to Release 9.4.
The colony-by-colony upgrade strategy provides the advantage of upgrading one or more colonies in a sharded deployment, while other colonies in the deployment remain in production. There is no loss of production time for colonies that are not being upgraded. Similarly, enterprises are maintained at different versions and are upgraded without the production time for other enterprises in the deployment being affected.
The colony-by-colony upgrade process involves the following major tasks:
"Colony-By-Colony Upgrade: An Example" describes a scenario in which one colony from a sharded deployment containing three colonies is upgraded from Release 9.3 to Release 9.4.