Cheetah Digital Loyalty Deployment Workflow

Single Tenant Architecture

As a single-tenant deployment architecture, the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform is optimized for medium-to-large loyalty programs, who desire maximum security, performance, and flexibility. Unlike other on-premise or multi-tenant loyalty solutions, every brand uses isolated and independent Cheetah Digital Loyalty environments.

Each and every loyalty program running on the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform has its own dedicated set of virtualized storage, compute processing, and content. To achieve cost-effective operations, the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud uses the latest virtualization technologies to maximize efficient use of shared computing resources. With this single-tenant architecture, the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud achieves application and infrastructure security: ensuring that each loyalty program is isolated and separate.  In addition, dedicated computing resources for each loyalty program ensures consistent performance by eliminating slowdowns due to usage by other loyalty programs. The Cheetah Digital Loyalty operations team can appropriately size each Cheetah Digital Loyalty environment for each brand’s expected consumer usage. Finally, Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud’s single-tenant architecture provides schedule flexibility for maintenance and updates. Cheetah Digital Loyalty’s operations team has the ability to separately perform changes to each loyalty program to meet the brand’s business schedule. For example, some consumer brands require maximum uptime during holidays, while other consumer brands are busier during weekends. 

Customer-Specific Staging Environments

Cheetah Digital Loyalty provides staging environments for conducting User Acceptance Testing (UAT). The staging environments are completely separate and isolated from production so marketers can safely and confidently modify configurations, test new modules and features, and run performance and scalability tests without affecting the production environments. For mobile clients, Cheetah Digital Loyalty recommends using Apple’s Test Flight feature to distribute and track iOS software versions to UAT users. For Android UAT users, Cheetah Digital Loyalty provides a website for Android UAT users to easily download and install the Android software versions.

Deploying Program Definitions and Rules

After configuring the Program Definition and Program Rules, use the Program Summary screen to deploy your changes to the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform. The Program Summary screen shows a history of previously deployed Program Versions.

The Program Summary screen has three buttons for deploying the latest Program Definition and Program Rules:

1. Deploy Version. Create a new Program snapshot with the latest Program Definition and Program Rules for deployment to the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform.
2. Validate. Validate the latest Program snapshot by checking items such as rule syntax.
3. Restart. Restart the Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform servers to read the latest Program snapshot.

Deploying Program Content

Deployment of Program Content, such as Offer, Challenges, and Rewards, is controlled by the publishing status and effective dates of each content item.

1. Publish Status. Members can only view items marked “Published”. Items marked “Draft” or “Archived” are not visible to members. 2.Effective Dates. If the marketer specified an effective date, members can only view items if the current time falls within the specified effective dates.

To publish a content item, you only need to make the content item as “Published” and set the effective dates to the timeframe you want the content item to be deployed. Note: Cheetah Digital Loyalty’s content targeting engine applies eligibility rules on the content item and/or scoring rules; hence the content item may not appear to every member even though the content item is “Published” and satisfied the specified date effectivity.

Deployment Best Practices

Because Cheetah Digital Loyalty employs a single-tenant architecture, Cheetah Digital Loyalty can independently upgrade each Cheetah Digital Loyalty environment, including staging and production environments, to the latest Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform version. Cheetah Digital Loyalty implements a “pull deployment policy” wherein Cheetah Digital Loyalty (a) schedules and announces availability of new production Cheetah Digital Loyalty releases; (b) works with each brand to identify the best date and time to apply new Cheetah Digital Loyalty releases; (c) performs a test deployment on a staging environment; then (d) performs the actual deployment on the brand’s production environment. Cheetah Digital Loyalty currently delivers production releases that pass our stringent QA and Performance testing about every 6-8 weeks, and Cheetah Digital Loyalty aspires to have each brand upgrade to a recent Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform release at least once per quarter to take advantage of the fast-changing technology and enhancements, such as security and other server-side fixes delivered by underlying vendors, as well as new Cheetah Digital Loyalty features and fixes.

As a best practice, Cheetah Digital Loyalty strongly recommends that brands first upgrade a staging environment to a new Cheetah Digital Loyalty Cloud Platform version before upgrading the production environment. Although the brand can engage the Cheetah Digital Loyalty’s Customer Success Team to perform and validate the upgrade, the brand achieves the best results when the brand’s own marketing personnel are directly involved in validating and signing off on the staging environment before upgrading the production environment.