Following the introduction of significant improvements in newer cartridge versions over the last year, we’re announcing the upcoming sunset of Algolia’s Salesforce B2C Commerce cartridge “Gen(eration) 1” as well as the associated internal “Stream” record ingestion service on 31 October 2024. “Gen 1” is defined as cartridge versions 23.4.x and lower. The “Stream” record ingestion service is a collection of endpoints at https://sfcc-stream.algolia.com.

Why is Algolia sunsetting “Gen 1”?

“Gen 1” cartridges and the “Stream” ingestion service have various limitations with regards to indexing scalability, reliability, transparency/monitoring and flexibility. In October 2023, Algolia has released a new “Gen 2”, which leverages Algolia’s highly scalable Search APIs instead of “Stream” for record ingestion. The new indexing pipelines and jobs bring considerable improvements such as:

• faster indexing: -40% to -99.8% reduction of indexing times (depending on specific scenarios)
• increased flexibility and granularity: e.g. support for zero-downtime reindexing, partial updates (incl. dedicated Price and Inventory Jobs) and Delta Product Jobs for ongoing updates; as well as configurable options for indexing per variant or per base product, and improved capabilities to customize and extend the data model
• enhanced indexing stability, error handling and self-service monitoring
• content indexing
• various SFRA/SiteGenesis usability and frontend enhancements, incl. support for color swatches, out-of-box events tracking, facet bucketing and SSR (Server Side Rendering)

Following the overwhelmingly positive feedback of many customers that have adopted the new “Gen 2”, Algolia has decided to fully discontinue “Gen 1” and focus all its effort on supporting and continually improving “Gen 2”.

What does this mean for customers on “Gen 1”?

Beginning 31 October 2024…

• “Gen 1” cartridge versions (v23.4.x and below),
• v1 Jobs (Jobs that are not based on the “Gen 2”’s new indexing Jobs ending in “_v2”) and
• direct calls to “Stream” (https://sfcc-stream.algolia.com)

… will cease to function. Only calls to Algolia’s official external APIs and cartridge “Gen 2” versions (23.5.x and above) will still be functional and supported.

What’s involved in the upgrade to “Gen 2”?

Algolia has published a migration guide here. It is recommended using the latest available cartridge version found on the cartridge Github repository. Upgrades usually take a few hours to a few working days, depending on the extent of required customizations. Algolia is happy to consult you before and during the upgrade.
We strongly encourage you to initiate the planning and upgrade process as soon as possible in order to ensure a smooth transition before this year’s Black Friday/Cyber Week.

Please don’t hesitate to contact your technical account team or our support team if you run into any transition issues or have any questions – we’ll do our best to help. Thank you for being a part of the Algolia community.