2018 Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition

Platform.sh Provides PaaS Technology to Magento Commerce

Magento, global commerce provider, integrates Platform.sh into its enterprise cloud solution

Paris, France. - April 12, 2016, for immediate release

Today, Platform.sh, the Continuous Delivery Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Cloud Hosting company, announced that Magento Commerce has chosen the company’s second generation PaaS for its newly launched Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition product. The flagship open-source Magento platform is already the worldwide leader in e-commerce, powering more than 250,000 sites globally and supporting over $50 billion in gross merchandise volume annually.

Magento wanted a strategic PaaS partner for their cloud offering and a solution that would help remove the traditional burden of managing multiple environments through the development and release management cycles. These capabilities allow businesses to reduce overall development costs and accelerate site development velocity, whilst at the same time de-risking a much higher rate of change to production services.

“It’s an incredible validation to our technology to see such a powerful force in the global eCommerce industry make such a step-change in their product portfolio to offer their customers greater business advantage,” said Fred Plais, CEO at Platform.sh. “This is exactly what we designed Platform.sh to do, something well beyond a public Platform-as-a-Service, and we’re excited that the impact will be so far-reaching”

Among the notable Platform.sh features which attracted Magento is the on-the-fly cloning technology which eliminates system administration chores and enables byte-for-byte copies of entire live sites, keeping the code, files, services and data in lockstep. Going beyond DevOps this “NoOps” approach maintains perfect consistency between branched environments, which in itself is valuable for live site support, but even more so for development teams, who now have on-demand access to perfectly consistent copies of production environments. This means every new feature can be developed and tested in parallel and in isolation in its own exact copy of the live system, removing end-of-sprint bottlenecks and giving CTOs and CMOs confidence that it will behave exactly as expected when it goes to production.

“With Platform.sh running Magento Cloud, enabling continuous deployment, CTOs and CMOs can really make a difference, especially during high traffic periods, promotions and sales when competitive edge is critical in the fight for the same seasonal buck.” said Kieron Sambrook-Smith, Chief Commercial Officer at Platform.sh. “Whoever would have thought a PaaS provider could do that!”

Platform.sh accelerates many common development and deployment processes, resulting in:

  • Up to 90% reduction in support ticket volumes and SysAdmin / DevOps,
  • better developer productivity (over 20%),
  • dramatically improved approvals and User Acceptance Testing (UAT) - because each feature branch has its own URL to be circulated (40% faster),
  • new levels of Continuous Integration (CI) through end-to-end process automation, as many common testing and tracking tools are now able to initiate activity within any Platform.sh project, requesting instant copies of environments for various purposes through the API.

“We evaluated many PaaS providers for Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition, but Platform.sh was the obvious choice for us given their focus on the PHP community, background in eCommerce and the innovative continuous cloud integration tools provided by their PaaS,” said Peter Sheldon, Head of Strategy at Magento Commerce. “The speed and ease with which you are able to test features or even the entire application against new versions of common services is game changing, and the more components there are, or the bigger and more complex the project becomes, the value Platform.sh brings becomes exponentially greater.”

The Platform.sh PaaS has been designed with continuous delivery and 99.99% high availability in mind. Scaling compute and storage resource up or down is both quick and seamless, whilst making critical changes to stack and core application components goes unnoticed by the shopping customer. In fact, over the 4 day Black Friday weekend last November, we were able to announce that not a single Platform.sh customer experienced any application downtime whatsoever, despite all the usual problems (and 70% of those are online merchants). Which tends to show the values that Platform.sh delivers: superior control to stem revenue loss, and the ability to make real-time revenue optimisation changes during peak traffic periods. This fine-grained control affords online retailers enormous competitive advantage exactly when they need it.