Magento Commerce Cloud: Everything You Need to Know

Magento Commerce Cloud: Everything You Need to Know

Magento Commerce Cloud

What enables you to optimize the growth and prosperity of your e-shop with the minimum maintenance efforts? The answer is celestial yet simple: Cloud services; that are powerful enough to not let you lift a finger while your businesses excel!

Speaking of the devil, Magento Commerce Cloud is a fully managed, cloud-based version of the Magento open-source platform. It uses cloud infrastructure of AWS and Microsoft Azure, offering a high-performance managed Magento cloud hosting solution for enterprise-level ecommerce businesses.

Cloud hosting enables you to install your website on a network of virtual and physical servers that are outside of your premises. While managing an eCommerce infrastructure, the deal breakers are security concerns, production deployment, and cost-effectiveness. While many enterprises choose to adopt on-premise web hosting (managing the eCommerce infrastructure on their own) for security reasons, what they seem to ignore is that it is indeed costly and high maintenance.

Quick Glance Over the Background

Magento Commerce Cloud also known as 'Adobe Commerce Cloud' was first released in 2016. In this piece, we’ll try to parse its core features that can keep a seller ahead of the competition.

Magento Cloud edition provides the users with a managed services infrastructure, high security, optimized performance, smooth integration with current frameworks, and scalable web storefronts. It aids the deployment process by developing new technologies such as Fastly, Blackfire, and New Relic.

Magento Commerce Cloud being the successor to Magento Commerce and Open Source editions adds a new perspective to the market solutions by bringing in an extra set of features.

  • Advanced pace development
  • Continued deployment.
  • Personalized and customizable environment.
  • Improved scalability
  • Enhanced security.
Magento Commerce Cloud is a tiered model and ranges from $40,000 to $300,000.

Magento Commerce Cloud Architecture

Let’s delve into the intricate lands of Magento Commerce Cloud architecture. Cloud services are known for their advanced feature sets and operational agility. However, understanding the pattern of seamless integration into the delicate framework of an eCommerce architecture and services infrastructure is of profound importance. Let's take a look at their plans:

The architecture is structured to support the following key features.

  • All Magento 2 core features
  • PayPal onboarding tool
  • Business intelligence essentials

The Starter Plan

The Magento cloud Starter Plan architecture encompasses four distinct environments, each serving specific purposes within the e-commerce ecosystem:

  1. Integration Environment: This environment comprises three distinct testable instances. Each instance encompasses a Git branch, a database, caching mechanisms, a web server, various services, configuration settings, and environment variables.
  2. Staging Environment: Designed as a pre-production testing environment, it encompasses the active staging branch, services such as Fastly and New Relic for optimization, a database, a web server, caching mechanisms, configuration settings, and environment variables.
  3. Production Environment: This environment is where the active master branch resides and includes caching mechanisms, third-party services, environment variables, configuration settings, and the web server itself.
  4. Inactive Branches: Sellers can get their hands on an unlimited number of inactive branches, facilitating development and testing without affecting the core production environment.

The Pro Plan

Magento Commerce Cloud Pro plan architecture underpins the following.
  • All Magento 2 core features
  • PayPal onboarding tool
  • Business intelligence pro
  • B2B module

The Pro Plan has three environments:

  1. Integration Environment: Within the Integration Environment, you'll find a comprehensive set of components including a web server, environment variables, database infrastructure, caching mechanisms, various configuration settings, and a suite of essential services.
  2. Inactive Branches: Merchants operating under this architecture benefit from an unlimited number of inactive branches, which are derived from the Integration environment.
  3. Staging Environment: Positioned as a pre-production testing environment, the Staging Environment encompasses crucial services such as Fastly and New Relic for optimization, a robust database system, a web server, caching solutions, comprehensive configuration settings, and a range of environment variables.
  4. Production Environment: The Production Environment is engineered to support an advanced three-node architecture, specifically tailored for data management, environment variables, caching mechanisms, configuration settings, and the integration of third-party services.

Magento Commerce Cloud Features

Magento Commerce Cloud offers a robust set of features catering to intricate e-commerce strategies:

Ece- Tool Package:

Magento brought forth an Ece-tool package that helps the sellers simplify various processes such as cron-management, docker deploy environment, and project verification. This package is a set of scripts and tools tailored according to the merchants’ needs. Certain other features are accompanied by this tool package such as managing the backup of the database, application of custom patches as well as environment configuration verification.

Cloud Hosting:

Leveraging the cloud infrastructure, Magento Commerce Cloud delivers rapid scalability and consistent performance regardless of seasonal sales fluctuations. Hosted on AWS (or Microsoft Azure for Pro projects), it benefits from dedicated development teams to optimize your e-commerce store's efficiency and resilience against surges in website traffic.

Rich Administrative Suite: 

Magento Commerce Cloud enhances the administrative suite of Magento Commerce with a suite of powerful features:

B2B Module: 

Equipped with tools like quoting, company accounts, quick checkout options, credit lines, customer-specific payment options, requisition lists, quick orders, customer-specific pricing and catalogs, purchasing limits, and more for seamless B2B operations.

Page Builder: 

Empowers users to create unique product pages and efficiently manage content.

Elastic Search:

Customizes search results and handles search queries across extensive catalogs in multiple languages.

Customer Segmentation:

Enables differentiation of customers and offers targeted cross-sells and up-sells based on customer attributes like address, browsing history, and shopping cart contents.

Content Staging:

Allows scheduling modifications to CMS Pages or Blocks before publishing.

Instant Purchase:

Enhances the checkout process by saving customer shipping and payment information for faster future purchases.

Visual Merchandiser:

Visually organizes product categories based on parameters like best-selling items, colors, sizes, discounted products, and more.

Magento Commerce Cloud Core Benefits 

Magento Commerce Cloud is comprised of five functional layers, each benefiting your store in multifaceted ways.
  • The underlying architecture is powered by Amazon Web Services and/or Microsoft Azure via cloud hosting.
  • Ease in deployment of a Paas solution is enabled by Git and Composer.
  • Magento, Business Intelligence, and B2B modules assist in facilitating commerce operations, presenting accurate and precise analysis and store reporting.
  • APM supported by New Relic collects, and analyzes data for optimum interactions between the project applications.
  • Fastly enhances the Content Delivery Network complimented by security features and tools for image optimization.

Fast and Easy Deployment:

Magento introduced a couple of crucial enhancements to aid the deployment process.
  • Through the cloud UI, Magento launched a staging/production git repository that makes the code merging in the deployment process hassle-free.
  • Self-serve configuration and staging management were also provided via Magento.

Page Speed Enhancements:

Fastly introduced by Magento is a Magento Commerce Cloud exclusive. With Fastly image optimization, sellers retain the benefit of image optimization and transformation without impacting server origin and photo quality.

Scalability and Customization:

Magento Commerce Cloud takes pride in its advanced security features. Web Application Firewall ensures PCI compliance of store and deterrence of malware inputs, injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and other such threats.

Performance Boost and Increase in Available Memory:

Magento introduced the M4 family of servers which is better than C3. The shift to a new family of servers was smooth and hassle-free. This shift has enabled merchants to have 100% growth in memory storage thus allowing them to scale up and expand the product’s catalog without impacting the store’s performance.

Total cost of ownership:

Many enterprises believe that Magento Commerce Cloud is a bit expensive. What they seem to overlook is the perks that come with the fee structure. It enables them to attain hosting, development, design, maintenance, support, security patches, and third-party and custom extensions that end up justifying the cost if not delivering more! Many enterprises opt for Open Source, failing to realize the advanced functionalities of Magento Cloud Solutions that encompass more than it costs. Merchants can eliminate the support cost and reduce development costs which otherwise is not possible.

Fast Marketing:

Fast marketing that is underpinned by automatic deployments is another advantage of Commerce Cloud. Cloud solution brings forth the quickest yet easiest way of maintaining a fully operational eCommerce store in approximately six months of deployment time.

Magento Commerce Cloud vs BigCommerce

Features

Magento 

BigCommerce

Cloud-based architecture

Amazon Web Service

Google Cloud

Security

Advanced Security

 Less Secure

Bulk Data Transfer

Supported

Not Supported

Degree of Control

Unlimited

Limited

Multiple Storefronts

Supported

Supported

Magento Commerce Cloud vs ShopifyPlus

Features

Magento 

Shopify

Cloud-based Architecture

Amazon Web Service

Proprietary

Security

Advanced Security

Good Security

Bulk Data Transfer

Supported

Supported

Degree of Control

Unlimited (Full source code access)

Limited (no access to the shared core)

Multiple Storefronts

Supported

Supported

To wrap it up

Magento Commerce Cloud emerges as a powerful and holistic solution for the world of ecommerce. It offers a compelling value proposition to businesses looking to thrive in digital landscape. With its robust feature set, scalability, cost effectiveness, efficient deployment options, Magento has a wide range of services that, regardless of the fact they come with a price tag, ultimately justify the investment. As eCommerce continues to evolve, Magento stands as a strategic choice for businesses to showcase their products while attaining operational efficiency.

This blog was created with FME's SEO-friendly blog