As a Magento System Integrator we work with clients through the entire life cycle of their site: project inception, site build, ongoing site maintenance and so forth. Our roots have always been in software development. It is what we love. Our core team of software engineers is an elite group of e-commerce and web development experts.
When we first forayed into Magento seven years ago we didn’t fully appreciate the hosting nightmare we were walking to. There seemed to be no standards on how a Magento site was hosted. We started our practice by inheriting existing Magento sites as many system integrators do. What was amazing is that every site we encountered was its own snowflake. There were so many possibilities and it seemed that everyone was trying a bit of everything without clear direction.
There were different flavors of UNIX, different branches of PHP, different web servers, different MySQL variations, different caching strategies, and on and on. We investigated a number of hosting providers that claimed to have just the right configuration for Magento sites, except we also inherited clients on those same providers that were struggling with performance and security. We also read a number of published white papers on Magento hosting providing contradictory recommendations.
We realized that we needed to figure this out for ourselves. So while hosting had always been an afterthought for our business it was now front and center. We grew a systems engineering team, hired new employees and transitioned other engineers into this effort. We documented all of our clients, and their unique configurations. We began to establish our own “solution” to hosting Magento.
We then found ourselves in the same place our clients did focussing on efforts that were not our core business. Magento merchants find system integrators because software development and maintenance is not their core business. Clients want to focus on the essence of their business, not the technology to make it happen. Here we were in a very precarious spot, a software development company now being burdened with hosting, unix environments, server management and collating a set of services/programs to run a Magento sites.
In comes the savior Magento Commerce Cloud. A solution provided by Magento to fully manage environments, security, hosting and content delivery. A true hosting solution implemented with all of the best practices, leveraging powerful integrated services and run by the people that know Magento best – Magento!.
Custom build scripts for each customer … gone.
Server setup and maintenance … gone.
Picking and testing the right solution set (web server, caching, CDN) … gone.
Managing unique security requirements for clients … gone.
Convincing clients of the importance of aligned production and staging instances … gone.
The pain of setting up additional environments for testing … gone.
For us, no longer did we need all of the system engineers. Our software developers that were constantly distracted by system configurations, they are back to developing.
With Magento Commerce Cloud we are back to being who we are … software developers. The increased focus has allowed us to do more and be more for our clients. It is no coincidence the rise of Magento Commerce Cloud parallels the growth of my company.