Commerce B2C Release Overview

Release Types

• B2C Commerce releases contain new features, improvements, and defect fixes. We deploy Major releases approximately every four to five weeks and expect to deploy 9–10 Major releases per year.

  • A Major Release deployment includes: 

    • Preview for OnDemand Sandboxes (or SIGs)

    • Major release (formerly called GA) for Primary Instance Groups (PIGs)

      • Note: a PIG includes PRD, DEV, and STG instances

     

• Minor releases contain defect fixes only and modify a Major release (e.g. 25.4 Minor modifies the 25.4 Major release). We schedule one Minor release following a Preview and, when needed, one following a Major release. Though we include dates in the schedule for PIG Minor releases, we will only use those dates if we decide a Minor release is needed (so we may not deploy Minor releases on all the dates indicated in the schedule).  

• Minor release deployments include:  

  • Preview Update (for OnDemand Sandboxes)
  • Minor release (for PIGs), only when needed

• In addition, we deploy patches that contain fixes for critical issues or issues with potential impact that need to be addressed before the next scheduled Major release.  
  • For critical issues, we can deploy patches across all Commerce B2C instances with minimal notice.
  • We use a Non-Disruptive Update (NDU) tool for patch deployments so there’s no impact on Jobs or Replications during the deployment. 
    

Standard Maintenance Windows

• The scheduled maintenance windows occur every Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 AM - 7:00 AM local Point of Delivery (POD) time.  We reserve the right to use these standard maintenance windows every week. But we may not use all available windows.   OnDemand Sandboxes are updated in the following maintenance windows:

  • AP instances - 2:00 AM - 7:00 AM JST

  • EU instances - 2:00 AM - 7:00 AM BST

  • US instances - 2:00 AM - 7:00 AM EST  

• Major release and Minor release deployments occur during the standard maintenance windows. All SIG or PIG instances are updated automatically during these maintenance events, but we can’t provide an exact update time for a specific customer instance.
• We occasionally use the 2:00 AM - 7:00 AM local POD time window on a different night for release maintenance for other services that support the B2C Platform.
• Patches are deployed outside of the standard maintenance window. We typically use the NDU tool for these deployments to minimize customer impact. See the Patches section for more information. 

Deployment Stages

• Preview and Preview Update (SIGs)

  • We deploy Preview and Preview Update releases to OnDemand Sandboxes (SIGs) during scheduled maintenance windows on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

  • The Preview stage helps validate the Major release with customers’ custom code in their sandbox environments. We don’t test custom code, so we encourage customers and partners to review features and test custom integrations with the Preview release.  We monitor customer Support cases for issues found on customer sandboxes during the Preview release.

  • During the Preview maintenance, schema, migration, and sandbox instance restarts result in 10-15 minutes of downtime for all sandboxes.

    • The Preview Update maintenance requires only sandbox instance restarts and also results in 10-15 minutes of downtime for all sandboxes. 
• Major and Minor Releases (PIGs)

  • We deploy Major releases to the PIGs on Tuesdays or Thursdays during the scheduled maintenance windows.

  • To uphold our commitment to customer trust and to ensure our B2C Commerce releases meet our rigorous standards, beginning in early 2025, the Major release deployments will occur in 4 stages as follows:

    • Australia PODs

    • Japan and designated AMER PODs 

    • EMEA PODs (excluding designated PODs)

    • AMER PODs and designated EMEA PODs 
      (For Stage 3 & Stage 4 - see the B2C Commerce 2026 Deployment Schedule for specific POD information)
      

  • During the Major release maintenance, schema migration and PIG instance restarts result in storefront downtime of 15 minutes or less. Occasionally, a required manual intervention increases the deployment’s impact. The custom maintenance page is displayed during the Major release maintenance. Scheduled Jobs and Replications are interrupted during the Major release  maintenance.
  • When we deploy a Minor release, the maintenance for PIG instances uses a non-disruptive restart process. There’s no impact on the storefront. However, any instances that aren’t restarted within 24 hours due to a long-running job or replication are restarted during the next day's maintenance window, which may cause interruptions to long-running jobs and replications running at that time. Because there’s no storefront downtime, a maintenance page isn’t displayed.

• Patches

  • We deploy patches to Sandboxes or PIGs when needed. If the patch requires a customer action we provide a Trust notification when we start the patch deployment.

  • Typically we use an NDU tool to restart instances after a patch is deployed.  The NDU tool restarts instances with minimal to no disruption to customers. It also enables us to deploy patch fixes faster without waiting for a maintenance window.  The impact on Production, Sandbox, and Development environment includes: 

    • Production: Patch deployments result in no downtime for storefronts and no interruptions to jobs or replications.
    • Sandbox and PIG DEV instance: Because these environments are not clustered, the NDU restart results in only minor disruptions of less than two minutes of downtime to those instances.
    • Occasionally, long-running jobs on some instances may require manual intervention to initiate a restart.
  • In the case of a Critical Issue that requires an immediate restart, Commerce B2C deploys a patch and restarts instances as soon as necessary to activate the fix. During the restart jobs and replications in progress get interrupted. We notify customers about an instance restart as soon as possible.  

Release Notifications

• The B2C Commerce schedule for the current year is available on the Help site.  We confirm the actual deployment dates via Salesforce Trust notifications:
  • 2 business days in advance for Preview deployments
  • 1 business day in advance for Preview Update deployments
  • At least 5 business days in advance for Major release deployments
  • 2 business days in advance for Minor release deployments 
• Release Content: The content of every Major release is announced in release notes and product documentation. Review the release notes to stay up to date on changes that could impact your custom code.
• Version number scheme: The Commerce B2C version scheme convention is Year.Deployment#. For example, 24.1 is the first Major release of 2024, and 24.2 is the second Major release of 2024.