You Don't Need Adobe Commerce Cloud to Survive Black Friday

Adobe Commerce Cloud is often perceived as the sole solution capable of withstanding the demands of Black Friday. However, upon closer examination, the reality is quite different. At its core, a Pro production environment consists of three virtual machines behind a load balancer, replicated across three AWS availability zones. This setup serves as the fortress that enables the system to endure the surge in traffic during the holiday sales event.

Contrary to popular belief, the Pro environment does not function as a primary server with two hot spares. Instead, it operates as an active-active system, where all three instances accept both reads and writes simultaneously. This unique configuration ensures that the loss of a single availability zone does not result in the store going offline.

Each of these three nodes carries the entire stack, including Fastly for CDN, WAF, and image optimization, NGINX with PHP-FPM as the web tier, Galera/MariaDB as the active-active database, Redis (Valkey in newer releases) as the caching layer, and Elasticsearch or OpenSearch for catalog search, depending on the version. GlusterFS is used as the shared file store, synchronizing media and static assets across the three nodes.

The misconception that Adobe Commerce Cloud requires six nodes stems from a misunderstanding of the company's architecture. The standard Pro configuration comprises three nodes, and the six-node arrangement is only applicable to higher-tier plans. The fundamental elements that enable the system to survive Black Friday are well-established architectural decisions, which are not exclusive to Adobe Commerce Cloud and can be replicated by any organization willing to invest in the appropriate infrastructure.

The true source of the system's resilience lies in several key architectural decisions, all of which are based on commonly understood patterns. These include edge caching with Fastly, an active-active database configuration, a web tier capable of horizontal scaling, and multi-AZ redundancy for fault tolerance. By focusing on these four fundamental aspects, it becomes possible to recreate the same level of reliability and performance using a different platform, such as AWS.

In essence, rebuilding Adobe Commerce Cloud on AWS would involve mapping the company's stack service-by-service, resulting in a configuration that mirrors the company's own reference architecture for migrating Magento Open Source or Adobe Commerce to the cloud.