Hosting architecture

Introduction

Bloomreach Content is a content product for commerce, offered as part of the Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud SaaS platform. The hosting infrastructure for Bloomreach Content is an integrated part of the product, engineered to support the most demanding enterprise-scale commerce sites with industry-leading availability, security, and performance.

Built on the proven Bloomreach Cloud platform

The Bloomreach Content product is built on the same foundation as the existing Bloomreach Cloud hosting platform and the Bloomreach Experience Manager (brXM, PaaS, or self-hosted) product. This combination has been proven in production with dozens of high-traffic sites in production over several years, across government, financial services, and B2C commerce. This platform has proven capable of delivering low latency for sites with trillions of requests per year. The Bloomreach Content product extends this platform to a full-service SaaS model without changing the fundamentals of this proven architecture.

The hosting platform is based on modern Kubernetes container infrastructure, which allows for compute resources to be shared between tenants dynamically for improved availability and cost efficiency. This allows Bloomreach Content to provide the benefits of high availability clusters for even the smallest-scale environments at a reasonable cost.

Availability

Multi-AZ by default

Bloomreach Content environments are hosted in a Kubernetes cluster with compute resources in the customer’s choice of a single public cloud region (initially EU or US-East). Within the cluster, each environment is hosted with containers in multiple availability zones to combine scalable performance and resiliency. All containers for a single customer run within a Kubernetes namespace, and each namespace has separate persistent storage. The storage uses multi-AZ database services, so that in the case of a public cloud failure, the environments can be replaced with new containers running in a different availability zone.

Cloudflare DDoS protection

Each Bloomreach Content environment includes Cloudflare protection against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. This extra value is provided without additional incremental cost.

Upgrades with zero site downtime

The Bloomreach Content product is engineered to support upgrades to the product without downtime for the delivery APIs. Content includes regular product improvements with no customer action required and only minimal maintenance windows for the content management functions. Site delivery is supported with an industry-leading availability SLA of 99.9%. (The timing of maintenance windows is published on our release notes page.)

Security

Customer data isolation

Persistent storage for Bloomreach Content is segregated by customer at the hosting platform level, providing a base level of data isolation as the foundation of access control protection.

Encryption at rest and in transit

Customer data is encrypted at rest in storage, and TLS encryption is used consistently within the hosting platform between components and when rendering public APIs.

Token-based API authentication

The Site Management APIs for developers and administrators are secured using TLS encryption and authenticated using temporary, revocable tokens as per current best practices for practical security.

Role-based access controls

Administrators have full control to provide varying levels of access to the content authoring, site editing, development, and publishing features of Content with self-service role-based access controls.

Performance

Generous default provisioning

Each new Bloomreach Content environment is provisioned with a generous resource allocation, sufficient to handle billions of page requests per month. Production environments are provisioned with extra resources as standard practice.

Scalable per environment

Within a customer namespace, each Bloomreach Content environment is independently scalable with additional compute resources to gracefully handle each site’s traffic patterns. Bloomreach proactively increases resources during critical holiday shopping periods to prepare for increased traffic.

Optimized for content workloads

The full stack of application code and hosting platform are optimized for content workloads, which have a typical pattern of highly concurrent, latency-sensitive read requests, heavy recency bias, and low rates of write requests. This pattern is well suited to caching, because of high cache hit ratios and low rates of eviction.

Multi-layer caching

Bloomreach Content applies caching at multiple layers of the product to reduce request latency and support radically high levels of request throughput. This includes query caching at the persistence layer, fast local indexes and caching within each cluster node, and caching of full API responses. In combination with active cache eviction strategies, Bloomreach Content provides instant updates from changes to content or page structure while simultaneously handling hundreds or thousands of requests per second with low latency.

Optimized requests-per-page

The Page Delivery API handles individual requests with low latency. But your visitor’s perception of performance also depends on how many backend requests are needed to render each page. Bloomreach Content's unique page-based approach delivers the full set of content needed to render all of the content-driven components on a page in a single API request while preserving full flexibility for the site editor to adjust page layout, edit content, and add more components via the Experience manager app. Bloomreach Content optimizes the tradeoff between site rendering performance and content flexibility.

Support

24x7 operational monitoring

Bloomreach Content is backed by continuous operational monitoring of the hosting platform and API availability. We have over a decade of experience supporting enterprise customers in production, and we understand the unique challenges of operating sites on a large scale.

Industry-leading SLAs

The Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud platform as a whole and Bloomreach Content specifically are offered with industry-leading, enterprise-class SLAs for both availability and incident response time.

Premium support available

Bloomreach offers premium support options with benefits such as a dedicated case manager, faster response times, and extended support hours for global enterprises.