Adobe Commerce Cloud Starter to Pro Migration
Did you know that Magento once offered an edition of Magento Commerce Cloud (now known as Adobe Commerce Cloud) called the ‘Starter’ edition? This edition, which is no longer open to new customers, was a scaled-back version of the standard Adobe Commerce Cloud infrastructure. To tell the two apart, Magento called the non-starter version ‘Magento Commerce Cloud Pro’.
When you’ve completed hundreds of Magento-based projects, you end up with experiences that no one else has - for instance, the time we migrated a client from Magento Commerce Cloud Starter to Magento Commerce Cloud Pro. Our Dev Team Lead, Tomasz Szmyt, who served as senior Magento developer on this project, is back with the details of this successful migration…
Our client Family Farm & Home is steadily growing and decided that Cloud Starter no longer met their needs. The Cloud Pro architecture offered not only greater performance than Starter, it also is capable of being “upsized” on demand and automatically during the peak season, functionality our client needed as they grew.
A few words about the technical stack
Family Farm & Home delivers a full omnichannel experience. They have many physical stores located throughout the United States, delivering a buy online pickup in store experience in each of their stores. You can read more about how we built out the technology to make this experience possible, but to summarize - the website is deeply integrated into bothEpicor Eagle and the Magento Order Management System. These integrations makes the technological stack behind the online and in-store customer experience fit together like the mechanism of a Swiss watch.
How did Creatuity prepare to migrate from Adobe Commerce Cloud Starter to Cloud Pro?
From the beginning of the project, we knew that it will be the first time when such a non-standard technical stack will be migrated from Cloud Starter to Cloud Pro. We started with a planning phase where we worked through all of the available document and resources related to such a task. Unfortunately - there is no step by step documentation on how to perform such a complex migration. So, we went back to the drawing board and began an analysis of every option for how we could complete this migration how this task differed from the well-known standard procedure of moving Magento to Cloud from on-premises servers.
The most crucial thing in this planning phase was communication with our client. We uncovered insights around the key functionality of the website that needed to work like a charm and separated those from things that are important, but not critical. With all of this data in hand, we crafted an initial migration plan. It included:
verification and adjustment of service versions on the new platform to be on par with those serving the live site (PHP version, etc.)
obtaining and sharing information needed by our partners (i.e. IP Addresses of the new servers, new access keys etc.)
matrix of actions and the party responsible for each step in the procedure
We then tested this plan with a dry-run migration, where we migrated a backup of the Adobe Commerce Cloud Starter site to the new Pro edition infrastructure, completing every step except actually pointing the client’s production URL to the new Pro edition infrastructure.
The dry-run migration helped us identify some unexpected issues that you might run into when migrating from Starter to Pro so that we were prepared for these during the live migration. These issues included:
When the Elasticsearch host information was changed to the new infrastructure, it caused issues with the product indexers, requiring a few items to be adjusted in the database and then a full reindex to be completed.
One particular extension’s license checking mechanism was confused by the new infrastructure and required assistance from the extension provider.
The level of service and features provided by Fastly differs between the Starter and Pro edition of Commerce Cloud, requiring Fastly settings to be manually re-configured in the Pro environment.
Migration Day
The migration procedure began at 1AM EDT. The first action on the list was to place the live site, still running on the Starter edition, in maintenance mode and create a backup of the database. At this point we also began transferring the latest media files from the Cloud Starter instance to Cloud Pro instance.
Around 2AM EDT we had the database restored on the new infrastructure, same with the entire catalog of media files. At this point we were greatly ahead of schedule - we expected this process to take 2 hours and had indicated to Adobe Support that we would want to make the switchover happen at 3AM. Instead of waiting another hour, we reached out to Adobe Support and asked them to make the infrastructure switchover happen immediately, instead of waiting until 3AM, and Adobe covered that instantly, switching traffic from the Starter edition infrastructure to the new Pro edition infrastructure.
After this was complete, we conducted a ‘redeployment’ - which in terms of Adobe Commerce Cloud is normally a process to deploy new code to the infrastructure. In our case - the code was already deployed, but we needed the new database to acknowledge the changes we had made. After that process completed and our QA engineer and the client reviewed the site on the Pro infrastructure, we removed maintenance mode and with just over an hour of downtime, the live site had been migrated from the Starter edition to the Pro edition.
Acknowledgements
This project would not have been successful without the support of both our client and the Adobe Commerce Cloud support team as well as a number of Creatuity team members. We want to especially thank the three leads on this project:
Tomasz Szmyt, Senior Magento developer
Kornelia Maciesza, Technical Project Manager
Jenna Warren, Magento Solution Architect
