Agent Multiversion Support

This feature provides flexibility to support running agent servers across multiple versions at the same time (parallel).

When dealing with multiple instances of OMS servers, it can be very difficult to Rollout a production release to all OMS servers at once. Instead, it’s preferred to deploy a release in a few number of OMS servers only for the purpose of proof of concept of a feature / functionality. Once the release is stable in these few OMS servers they would Rollout the same release in remaining OMS servers in a phased manner. Our product should provide flexibility to support running application servers/agent servers across multiple versions in parallel.

The multi version agent support is also useful for the Rollout of upgrades or Fix packs in Sterling Applications.

For Agent multiversion support, the version will become an important identifier when dealing with transaction data. Some of the key points to be noted are:
  1. Multiple configuration data should be present for each rollout version.
  2. Transaction data is tagged with the rollout version indicated by the OMS server deployment.
  3. Agents will use version identifier to filter transactional records.
  4. Agents can either process version specific data or all data based on the agent configurations.

This is a sample architecture showing OMS deployment in multiple stores, web and call center channels across different versions.

As part of the solution for Stage Rollout, the requirement here is multiple versions of OMS agent servers need to process data from the same transaction schema.

So there is a need for the following:
  1. Transactional data should be tagged by their Rollout Version.
  2. Agent servers should be aware of the Rollout Version of the transaction data and process only transactional data that matches the Agent’s Rollout Version.

The Agent Multi Version feature addresses this requirement.