Deployment options

Some aspects of the implementation process differ depending on the type of environment where you deploy your Pega Customer Decision Hub application. Review the available deployment options and related implementation considerations. Pega Customer Decision Hub supports the following deployment options:

Pega Cloud Services

If your Pega Customer Decision Hub application is deployed in a Pega Cloud services environment, the Pega Cloud services team provisions the hardware for your environment and installs all of your required software. The process of creating your application is streamlined and much of the technical configuration is done for you, except for steps that only you can complete. Pega Cloud services manages deployments for security, stability, and premium support. For more information, see Learning about Pega Cloud Services.

If you deployed your application in a Pega Cloud services environment, some tasks in this guide do not apply to your application. This is noted in the description of each task.

Deployment on premises

If you deploy your application on a server on the premises of your own organization, you are responsible for provisioning the hardware for your environment.

Deployment on third-party cloud

For third-party cloud deployments, the hardware is provisioned by the cloud provider.

Environments

A Pega Customer Decision Hub implementation requires the following environments:

Development

A system of record (SOR) for rules and artifacts, used by developers to make enterprise changes to your application.

Staging

A testing environment for testing changes to your application before they are deployed to production.

Business Operations Environment (BOE)

An environment that business teams use to plan, build, test, and optimize their changes, for example, create or modify actions and treatments, or introduce new predictive models. For more information, see Business operations use cases.

Production

The latest stable live version of your system that is available for end users.

The following diagram shows the deployment architecture for a system with Pega Customer Decision Hub with the required environments and the change pipelines that connect these environments.

Pipelines

As a best practice, the change management process in an organization involves the following types of changes:

Enterprise changes

Enterprise changes involve changing the application itself, for example, by modifying the user interface. Enterprise changes are done by developers in a Development system of record (SOR) environment, and then pushed to other environments in the pipeline.

Business changes

Business changes involve business-as-usual operations such as the creation of new actions, treatments, customer segments, and so on. This type of change is triggered by business users in a BOE environment, and then pushed to other environments by using the Business Change pipeline.

Data migration

The automated data migration pipeline provides you with the means to test how the changes that you make to decision strategies affect their results, without running these strategies in a live production environment. You can sample a selection of real customer and internal Pega Platform data, and then migrate the sample to the BOE environment. As a result, the simulations are based on the migrated production data, that is, customer details, adaptive model data, and interaction history, which helps you assess how your changes are reflected in real-life scenarios. For more information, see Data migration pipeline overview.

Orchestrator

Your system also requires an orchestrator to manage the migration of changes through the change pipelines. In Pega Cloud services deployments, the default orchestrator is Deployment Manager.