Before developing your online store, decide whether you intend to manage your infrastructure on your own (on-premise) or let a third party (cloud-based) run it for you. Hosting your website on a cloud service is becoming a trend due to the fast production deployment and cost-effectiveness of such an option.
If you make a decision to apply a cloud-based ecommerce solution, one of the best options is Magento Commerce Cloud, which was launched in 2016 and became quite popular at the time.
In this article, we will go over the Magento Cloud features and core benefits that help Magento to keep ahead of the competition. Before we dig deeper into the topic, let’s figure out — what is Magento Commerce Cloud?
What is Magento Commerce Cloud?
Magento has three editions: Magento Open Source (Magento Community), Magento Commerce (Magento Enterprise), and Magento Commerce Cloud (Magento Enterprise Cloud). If you want to find out which edition is right for your ecommerce company, check out our article Magento 2 Commerce vs Open Source vs Commerce Cloud.
Magento Commerce Cloud is a robust PaaS (Platform as a Service) solution that brings together the unmatched features of Magento Commerce and runs on Amazon Web Services. Magento Cloud Edition provides merchants with managed services infrastructure, high security, optimized performance, smooth integration with current frameworks, and scalable web storefronts.
Magento Cloud also came up with innovative technologies such as Fastly, Blackfire, and New Relic, which makes the deployment process much easier.
Magento Commerce Cloud supports a set of extra features that brings this edition to a new level in comparison to Commerce and Open Source editions:
Rapid Development
Continuous Deployment
Customizable Environment
High Scalability
Enhanced Security
Magento Cloud’s main features. Image credit: Magento.
Magento Enterprise Cloud Cost is based on a tiered model and ranges from $40,000 up to $300,000.
Magento Commerce Cloud Architecture
Now, let’s take a closer look at Commerce Cloud Architecture. Magento Cloud offers Starter and Pro plans. Each plan has an exceptional architecture to leverage your ecommerce store development process.
Magento Commerce Cloud Starter plan architecture supports:
All Magento 2 core features
PayPal Onboarding Tool
Business Intelligence Essentials
The Starter Plan Architecture has four environments:
The Starter Plan
Integration
The Integration environment includes three testable environments. Each environment has a Git branch, database, caching, web server, services, configurations, and environment variables.
Staging
The Staging environment is a pre-production testing environment. This environment includes the staging active branch, services (Fastly, New Relic), database, web server, caching, configurations, and environment variables.
Production
The Production environment includes the active master branch, caching, third-party services, environment variables, configurations, and the webserver.
Inactive
Merchants have access to an unlimited number of inactive branches.
Magento Commerce Cloud Pro plan architecture supports:
All Magento 2 core features
PayPal Onboarding Tool
Business Intelligence Pro
B2B module
The Pro Plan Architecture has three environments:
The Pro Plan
Integration
The Integration includes a web server, environment variables, database, caching, configurations, and some services. Inactive— Merchants have an unlimited number of inactive branches based on the Integration environment.
Staging
The Staging environment is a pre-production testing environment. This environment includes services (Fastly, New Relic), database, web server, caching, configurations, and environment variables.
Production
The production supports a three-node, advanced architecture for your data, environment variables, caching, configurations, and third-party services.
Magento Cloud Pro Architecture Environments. Image credit: Magento.
Magento Cloud Features
Magento Cloud provides advanced features you can apply to complex ecommerce strategies. Here are a few of them:
Ece-tool Package
Magento introduced an ece-tools package to provide a scalable deployment tool tailored to the merchant’s requirements. The ece-tools package is a set of scripts and tools aimed to simplify various processes, such as cron management, docker deploy environment, and project verification.
It includes scripts and commands that give merchants the possibility to automatically deploy the ecommerce projects. With the ece-tools package, you can manage the backup of the database, apply custom patches, and verify environment configuration.
Hosted on the Cloud
One of the most significant aspects of the Magento Commerce Cloud is its cloud nature. Magento Commerce Cloud is run on AWS and hosted by a dedicated team of developers who can guarantee your ecommerce store is operating with maximum efficiency. Magento is aware of the massive traffic spikes that can influence online stores and can easily handle all the occurring problems.
Rich Administrative Suite
Magento Commerce Cloud offers a rich administrative suite of Magento Commerce Edition that enables you to smoothly handle complicated projects. Here are some features:
B2B (business to business)Module – The B2B module includes a number of features such as: quoting, company accounts, quick checkout options, credit lines, customer-specific payment options, requisition lists, quick order, customer-specific pricing and catalogs, purchasing limits, and more.
Page Builder – With Page Builder, you can create unique pages around their products and maintain content more efficiently.
ElasticSearch – Elasticsearch enables you to customize search results throughout your Magento store and manage search requests through large catalogs in multiple languages.
Segmentation – Customer segmentation gives the possibility to differentiate customers, and offer cross-sells/up-sells based on customer address, browsing history, shopping cart contents.
Content Staging – With Content Staging, you have the possibility to schedule the modifications to CMS Pages or Blocks to go live.
Instant Purchase – Magento automatically saves a customer’s shipping and payment information in order to accelerate the checkout process.
Visual Merchandiser– A Visual Merchandiser is a great tool for organizing your categories’ products in visual mode by parameters such as best-selling items, colors, size, discounted products, and more.
Magento Cloud Core Benefits
Are you impressed by the features of Magento Cloud? Hold on, there are even more reasons to choose Cloud over other editions. Let’s have a look at the advantages that Cloud Edition provides to its customers.
Seamless and Fast Production Deployment
Initially, adding projects on Magento Cloud was quite a complicated task, as developers needed to use three separate git repositories to handle the integration, staging, and production environments.
After deploying in the integration environment, the development team needed to move to a separate production repository, which caused discord in the installation process. Moreover, settings and regulatory options for the staging and production environments required manual work from the Magento developers.
In 2017, Magento introduced two crucial enhancements aimed to make Magento cloud deployment faster and much easier.
Magento launched a staging/production git repository through the Cloud UI and merged all environments into a single Git tree, making the code merging in the deployment process much easier.
Magento also provided self-serve configuration and management of staging/production.
Page Speed Enhancements
High-quality photos and videos of your product are one of the best strategies to increase ecommerce conversion rates. To find more ways to improve the ecommerce conversion rate, check out our recent blog post.
Nevertheless, these high-resolution images usually cause slow loading time. To address the matter, Magento introduced Image Optimization technology powered by Fastly exclusively for Magento Commerce Cloud. With Fastly Image Optimization, merchants can transform and optimize images without affecting the origin server and quality of the photos.
High Scalability and Easy Customization
Magento Commerce Cloud takes care of scaling your ecommerce store to manage huge website traffic. Magento Commerce comes with scalability features such as order archiving, multiple master servers, scalable backend product management, and MySQL customer support.
The Magento Cloud environment operates the same way as Open Source and Magento Commerce and is easily customizable. Thus, you can install third-party extensions and build custom extensions in a simple way.
Enhanced Security
Due to its cloud nature, Magento provides great security while reducing the operational responsibilities of the merchant. Magento launched additional protection measures – Web Application Firewall (WAF).
Web Application Firewall deters malware from trying to infiltrate your online store. For Magento Cloud users this feature is a standard part of the cloud infrastructure and is at no cost.
Check out our article on the Magento security best practices. There you can find useful info that can help to prevent attacks from happening so your data and your customers’ data is safe.
Boost in Performance and Increase in Available Memory
Magento Cloud is famous for its excellent performance as it works on AWS – one of the most robust cloud infrastructure. Previously Magento used С3 family of servers, which was a good technology in those days, but today there are far more advanced solutions. In 2018 Magento moved from the C3 to the M4 family and shifted smoothly all the existing clients to a new family of servers.
Moreover, the Magento team also performed optimization of some other features such as MySQL buffers, REDIS Cache, and ElasticSearch, which brought in additional performance enhancements.
To find out how to speed up Magento 2, check out our blog post.
The shift from the C3 family of servers to M4 not only delivered a boost in performance but also an increase in the available memory of the cloud service. The M4 servers offer a 100% growth in the memory storage.
Total Cost of Ownership
Many small companies consider that Open Source solution provides the lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Selecting an Open Source Edition is a good option if you want to exclude software and subscription fees.
However, keep in mind you that TCO is a lot more than just the price of your software. It’s also development, hosting, design, maintenance, support, security patches, third party and custom extensions, and more. For the most part, Open Source is more expensive than a Commerce Cloud with advanced functionalities.
This is particularly evident when making comparisons between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce Cloud. With Magento Cloud, you can eliminate the support cost and reduce development costs.
Read our article to find out more about the Commerce Cloud’s total cost of ownership.
Fast Time to Market
Fast time to market is one more advantage offered by Commerce Cloud. With Magento Cloud, you can run marketing faster with automatic deployments. Cloud solution introduces the quickest way of maintaining a fully-operational ecommerce store in six-month deployment time.
Magento Commerce Cloud vs BigCommerce
Magento Commerce Cloud is run on AWS, whereas BigCommerce is operated onGoogle Cloud. In comparison to Magento, the level of customization is restricted in BigCommerce. With the introduction of such technologies as Fastly, Commerce Cloud Edition got a higher level of data security, to compare it with basic security patches of BigCommerce.
Magento vs BigCommerce. Image credit: Magenticians
Thus, flexible customization along with advanced security makes the Magento Commerce Cloud a better platform for enterprise-level companies.
Features
Magento
Big Commerce
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 Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Magento Cloud serves both B2B and B2C businesses with its highly customizable solution and provides a great range of tools and features. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is aSaaS-based, fully managed multi-tenant platform.
Salesforce vs Magento. Image credit: Paulnrogers
Features
Magento
Salesforce
Cloud-based architecture
Amazon Web Service
Proprietary, Multi-Tenant
Security
Advanced Security
Good Security
Bulk Data Transfer
Supported
Not Supported
Degree of Control
Unlimited (full source code access)
Limited (no access to the shared core)
Multiple Storefronts
Supported
Supported
Check out our article to get a full comparison between Magento vs Salesforce.
Magento Commerce Cloud vs Shopify Plus
Shopify Plus is a cloud-based platform that takes care of operating your servers, optimizing it for performance and security patches. However, a disadvantage of Shopify Plus is that you do not have access to the code, meaning less flexibility in customization.
Shopify Plus vs Magento. Image credit: Magnetoitsolutions.
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
If you want to find which ecommerce platform is right for your retail business, check out our Magento vs Shopify comparison in detail.
Why should you choose Magento Cloud?
Magento Commerce Cloud provides a great variety of inclusive features tailored to specific ecommerce business requirements. You should opt for Magento Cloud Edition if you require:
Reliable Cloud Delivery
Seamless Production Deployment
Continuous Innovations
Multiple Business Models
Advanced Analytics
Omnichannel Experiences
Customizable Service
Enormous Administrative Suite
Enhanced Security
Short Time to Market
Page Speed Improvements
Better Performance
Elastic Scalability
Increased Storage
All these features are valuable only if you have a development team that can help you to turn Magento’s functionality into your advantage. As certified Magento Solution Partners, our agency can help you to deliver an omnichannel retail experience and integrate all business processes into a powerful Magento solution.
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