The Cloud Backup and Migration v. 2.0 for SAP® Commerce is an extension for automatization backups and migration working with SAP Commerce Cloud projects. It is designed by developers for people involved in a daily routine with media files management.
In today’s digital landscape, it’s critical to understand why operation speed matters. Picture yourself in the role of content manager struggling with data on the B2B or B2C e-commerce store selling 10 000 items and over. You’d be surprised at how often non-developers could perform data migration to do their jobs. How many efforts it takes to prepare, sort, upload/download images, make changes, and iteratively manage product files?
With over 10 years of experience under our belt, Aimprosoft delivers Hybris e-commerce solutions for B2B/B2C companies. During our path, we went through thick and thin data migration. We found ourselves needing to create a tool that can save developer and non-developer efforts on backup creation and deployment on the server up and running equal to 3 working days.
Media migration can be a daunting task, especially for those who lack development experience. The CBM module gives an opportunity even for newcomers to save 24 hours for data migration issues in real-time.
As well as cost-savings, businesses aim to use automated management and migration and backup migration to improve resource distribution. The first tries of the CBM module have yielded positive results with minimum fuss. Our clients got accelerated task performance among employees, thereby savings for labor costs.
That’s how the community got a new way to make backups, migration, and heavy media files management in high-load SAP Hybris projects. The module is open source and available for free download from GitHub or the SAP’s official enterprise marketplace.
Not only does this streamline operation by improving the speed of task performance, but it also empowers all non-developers in the company to do time-consuming migration-related work on their own.
Let’s see how Amazon S3 and Dropbox cloud services appear in media assets migration and backup management.
Where are we on the server space?
It lightens on the wallet of business owners and gets on developers’ nerves when space is over. It’s proven that media files consume the most server space (90% of the total as usual) among all stored data. Moving the media files from one storage to another for a couple of seconds is a revolutionary step towards better efficiency.
Data migration with the CBM module solves the issues related to decreasing disk storage use and network bandwidth, accelerating file migration, and shortening the production time. It’s a pretty good way to mix storage services for data migration, optimizing your space, cost, or user convenience.
Amazon S3 and Dropbox: limitless of accounts
Despite high scalability and pay-for-use option, you can benefit from Amazon S3 cloud storage due to the connection of unlimited accounts. The same works with Dropbox. Our e-commerce clients widely use both sharing storage solutions; that was a trigger for designing the CBM module connected to these clouds.
Data management in e-commerce projects is sophisticated because of having bulks of media data that require a higher quality every sales season to capture the customer. One automated solution connected to a number of storage accounts can streamline shared content storing and management requires enormously.
SAP® Commerce
If you have active Amazon S3 and Dropbox accounts, you can make backups with the CBM module and transfer content between them as well as to newly created ones. Moreover, an option to switch between storages for seamless data migration and backup management extempts from the need to make a go-between step on your local machine.
Whatever temporary or permanent backups, all large amounts of data can be moved from point A to point B quickly. And what is really great, you have the server running in the hot mode.
Connect to Dropbox as you used to Amazon S3
The point is that SAP Commerce Cloud has no typical connection to cloud services. Every time Java developers all over the world have to invent custom ways to bind extensions to SAP Hybris websites. Imagine, how much precious time can save one human-oriented solution that leads a user the most familiar way for them?
We built a special connector in the Commerce CBM to cover the lack of familiar connection flow to Dropbox. Users access Dropbox for the file import or export purpose in a more natural way as they used to do with Amazon S3 accounts. It can play the role of target or source storage connecting to your local machine or another cloud service.
Continue in real-time
We really got to get a non-stop operation. The CBM responded to the challenge to migrate medias in real-time in a couple of seconds through the all-in-one tool. A common practice with data migration in SAP e-commerce projects requires using separate extensions to migrate media content. It is carried out via backoffice with a local machine as source storage to some external one. Does it ring you a bell?
SAP® Commerce
You make ‘click-click,’ and your bulks of data go from a local server to any Dropbox or Amazon S3 account by a reference URL generated in the strategy. The Commerce CBM doesn’t depend on the technical parameters of Hybris websites it serves. Users continue to access media files on the server of the up and running e-commerce website. Also, we managed to save the quality state of migrated files on the same level as before migration.
Users continue to access media files on the server of the up and running e-commerce website.
Automated backup management
I think difficulties can make you think of original solutions. When we managed data backups for one of our B2C clients who sells sunglasses and apparel, we spent a lot of time and energy on manual actions. A primary weakness in SAP was no out-of-the-box automated backup management solution.
Delivering the CBM module, we have saved staff efforts, company money, and consumer time for purchase. As a result, no custom scripts, no content filter, no permission restrictions to backups. The ready-to-use solution plays a useful role in the process of backup management and media migration. It takes fewer hours for delivery.
Data exporting at a glance
Data exporting is not a business-centric issue until it doesn’t save money. Automated backups of media content from the website CMS exported with the CBM module are compact and easy to use. It works for SAP Commerce Cloud 1808/1811 projects now only.
The data is archived into one backup file instead of several incomplete ImpEx files automatically in the B2C Accelerator. You can get a single zipped file with exporting media content from a single catalog or the whole site. You can store and restore ImpEx, CSV, and medias in one zip archive in one click.
Access permission and work in parallel
There is no need to worry about unauthorized users tampering with precious files. You can set role-based access to backups without the risk of altering or removing data.
Supervisor decides on access permissions to backups with role-based access control. This preventive measure provides minimization of system security risks. Creating the CBM module, we took into account the nature of e-commerce data that is dynamically growing. This type requires special protection to prevent security risks.
Shared access enables developers and content managers to multitask in parallel. The CBM module covers it. The latest data backups are available to access smoothly at any time by users without queues. The convenience of the solution is in an efficient project team collab apart from automation. Users export, backup, and restore data independently, followed by applying it on any server successfully.
Good-looking perspective
Usually, the UI of problem-solving solutions in its early stages doesn’t make waves in the world of developing. We didn’t plan too. The CBM module just has a beautiful backoffice perspective. Agree, it’s nice to backup and migrate data following the intuitive steps and access necessary functions.
Media migration scenario
Migrating data in the right way is a critical part of backup, but migrating it painlessly is another story. As we clear it up above, there is no handy feature in SAP Commerce Cloud to perform it, which spurred us on developing alternatives.
Let’s see the possible scenario of data migration.
The CBM module gets on with both data export and import. So you have an e-commerce store running on SAP Commerce 1808/1811 instance. The downloaded extension (Aimprosoft GitHub or SAP App Center) is installed on the stopped server.
You should add the login credentials of the module after updating the system and proceed with storage.
Dropbox and Amazon S3 are two available cloud services in the CBM for SAP® Commerce v2.0 so far. It is a temporary constraint there; we plan to widen the set of storages in order to enable a greater number of capabilities.
SAP® Commerce
At this step, you can click a drop-down list to choose data migration accounts on the import page. Choosing source storage, you can select one of Amazon S3 active accounts.
When you connect an active storage account to the CBM module, you need to put input keys and push the button ‘Connect.’ Now, you can use this account. Connectors contain saved credentials dropped down from the list to perform multiple data migration from import to export storage. Credentials of Dropbox or Amazon S3 are contained in connection providers in the CBM module.
A source and target storage hasn’t to be matched. If choosing the same storage for data import, a pop-up will appear to notify you about the mistake. Storage for exported data is expected to be different.
The import process starts with uploading files. You will know about successful file downloads by the verification messages. Note, the migration runtime depends on the volume of processed data.
It will show you that the import has done successfully when restored files are in the same state as you uploaded them before backing up. Congrats, you have completed the backup on hand ready to be used for good intentions.
For better management, the CBM module provides key information about task status, code, and the migration performer in the ‘History’ section.
Export scenarios with large data assets are also possible with the CBM Commerce on the hot servers and are described in our guidelines on Aiprosoft GitHub.
Final word
Aimprosoft has more faith in its potential. It was a great warm-up for what comes next.
The CBM module launch provided the community with precious experience and proved that we are on the right track. After getting feedback and first results, we bravely chose to go ahead. Hope to excite you with a fine product of the CBM v3.0 soon.
You can give the extension a go yourself by downloading it here. We are open to conversation.
