I have heard the noise from other system integrators;
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- Magento Commerce Cloud is hard to work with
- We prefer our technology stack
- My system engineering team wants more control
- The Magento Commerce Cloud support team is not responsive
- The Magento Commerce Cloud is too immature
- and on and on…….
I must admit it, I do not get it. The single greatest achievement for Magento 2 Commerce is the introduction of the cloud infrastructure. I am serious. Yes, the code architecture is vastly improved and the growth in content management is fantastic. Magento 2 is across the board a vast improvement over Magento 1. Yet, none of it compares to Magento Commerce Cloud.
So why all the push back?
Why are some resisting?
Why would anyone not recommend Commerce Cloud versus self-hosted?
Yes there are times a customer has unique requirements that requires on-premise hosting. Other times customers want their own IT staff to manage their servers. Those customers will never use Commerce Cloud. Everyone else should be using Commerce Cloud.
When the choice is up to us on what to recommend to a customer, we choose Commerce Cloud every time. No question. All we have to do is look at our Magento customer base and document the hosting related issues we have encountered in the last two years to understand anything besides Cloud is simply not the best choice.
Hosting and environment problems stink. There is always urgency. There is always finger pointing. No-one is happy. Customers push back on those large bills to address hosting emergencies. Anyone who has been responsible for an e-commerce site has experienced this pain. Here’s the proof in the proverbial pudding:
15% of Magento clients are not on Commerce Cloud. They represent 90% of the hosting issues we have to deal with!
The problems are numerous and span the entire hosting spectrum. Here are just a few:
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- Auto-OS updates breaking Magento
- Physical hardware failure
- Poor caching solutions
- ISP security breaches
- Poor system monitoring
- Insecure system configurations
Some hosting providers don’t understand Magento at all and others have “experts”. Unfortunately, those experts are rarely involved until you have gone through multiple tiers of support and a problem remains unresolved. Our customers still call us first when there is a problem. They may be paying for hosting company support, but they rely on us because we are more responsive and are capable of determining if the issue is hosting or application related. For us, the hosting companies simply don’t provide much value. We spend much of our time explaining to the providers why what they are suggesting doesn’t even make sense (they almost always want to upgrade hardware/software before they really understand what the root cause of the issue is).
Before you think that my system engineering team just stinks, a number of these issues are from inherited projects from other system integrators that are clearly not following Magento’s best practices. That tells me one of the very things that Commerce Cloud was created to address over Magento 1 is still happening in Magento 2. Outside of the Commerce Cloud, Magento SIs are still getting it wrong.
Commerce Cloud is of course not perfect. No hosting is. We have experienced a few issues and had some miscommunications. Yet we are on the same team, Kadro and Magento, working together for our joint customer and have worked it out every single time. When Magento published that they had no system downtime during the holiday season, that should have been a wake up call for the doubters. I know we experienced NO system issues during the holidays from any of our clients on Magento Cloud, NONE!. It was amazing. To be honest I was in a bit of disbelief … but how wonderful. This is the future and the future is now.