Sitecore deployment environments

Commerce environments provide the ability to have separately configurable pools of data and service functionality that run together in a single-service instance. An environment has another application at the overall solution level.

There are three Sitecore deployment environments in a production deployment, including where the Commerce Engine roles are deployed:

Sitecore Content Management

Internal environment for authoring content before publishing for public consumption. Content authors and marketers create and edit content. They build and publish the web experiences from here.

Sitecore Content Delivery

External environment for delivering content to the public; for example, the Storefront is hosted here. It serves requested pages and media assets to site visitors and collects analytics data in session, for delivering dynamic personalized experiences to shoppers.

Commerce

The Commerce Engine and Commerce databases. This environment provides the commerce services, for example, orders, carts, pricing, and promotions.