Improvement 1: Sandbox maintenance windows
Imagine you are a Salesforce B2C Commerce developer. You have an incredibly urgent deadline to hit (who doesn’t?). You’ve started your day early, you’ve got your coffee, you’ve got your solution in mind, you’re ramped up, you’re raring to go.
You go to your Salesforce B2C Commerce sandbox.
Your sandbox is down.
“Weekly maintenance. Come back later.”
This frustration has been felt by countless developers for years. But now, Salesforce has announced that moving forward, B2C Commerce On-Demand Sandboxes (ODS) will have maintenance windows fully outside of the business week—on Saturdays.
In order to reduce the disruption of service caused by maintenance, all regular maintenance tasks of Salesforce B2C On-Demand Sandbox will be moved to Saturday from 0200 to 0800 UTC (9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. Eastern time). During the maintenance window, a small number of sandboxes will experience a short (approximately 5 minutes) downtime and will restart once.
Please note this is a weekly recurring maintenance every Saturday until further notice.
This is a huge quality-of-life improvement for developers around the world, ensuring less business disruption (unless you’re doing some weekend-warrior work, in which case you should welcome the break).
Improvement 2: API Quotas
Next imagine you are a Salesforce B2C Commerce architect, working with your business and development partners. Your team is tech-savvy. They embrace composable and API-first paradigms. They embrace seamless, one-page checkout. They have designed a checkout experience that interfaces with third-party and first-party systems, between payment, tax, fraud, loyalty, shipping, CRM, and more—fast and efficiently, providing a tremendous, mobile-first, personalized customer experience.
You are two-thirds through building this solution when you hit a wall: Salesforce Commerce API quotas. The quota is set to eight API calls per page load. This quote is enforced to ensure performance and protect the efficiency of Salesforce’s SaaS solution, but in this case you are confident you have built a performant solution.
Previously Salesforce has agreed to relax this quota on a case-by-case basis, but just jumping through the hoops of opening a Support ticket and negotiating a new quota has been a lamentable task for architects for years.
Now, that won’t be needed. In the upcoming Salesforce B2C Commerce release 22.8, the HTTPClient.send quota has been increased from 8 to 16, with the warning similarly doubled from 5 to 10.
This has pros and cons, Salesforce architect Oleg Sapishchuk noted. More API calls could result in more time to process and slower storefronts—this was why the quota was enforced in the first place. But for well-architected solutions integrating with reliable APIs, this is a tremendous boon.
Developers and architects have been clamoring for these updates for years. Salesforce is showing they’re listening with these two quality-of-life improvements for Commerce Trailblazers. That’s as encouraging as the improvements themselves.
Have questions about your Salesforce Commerce Cloud implementation? Get in touch with the experts at Astound.