Pro architecture

Your Magento Commerce (Cloud) Pro architecture supports a maximum of eight environments that you can use to develop, test, and launch your store. Each environment contains a database and a web server:

• Integration—Provides a single environment branch, and you can create up to four additional, environment branches. This allows for a maximum of five active branches deployed to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) containers.
• Staging—Provides a single environment branch deployed to dedicated Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) containers.
• Production—Provides a single environment branch deployed to dedicated Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) containers.
• Global Master—Provides a master branch deployed to Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) containers.

The following table summarizes the differences between environments:

	Integration	Staging	Production
Supports settings management in the UI	Yes	Limited	Limited
Supports multiple branches	Yes	No (Staging only)	No (Production only)
Uses YAML files for configuration	Yes	No	No
Runs on dedicated IaaS hardware	No	Yes	Yes
Includes Fastly CDN	No	Yes	Yes
Includes Blackfire.io	Yes	Yes	Yes
Includes New Relic APM	Yes (Only one branch)	Yes	Yes

Your project is a single Git repository with three, main environment branches for Integration, Staging, and Production. The following diagram shows the hierarchical relationship of the environments:

Integration environment

Developers use the Integration environment to develop, deploy, and test:

• Magento application code
• Custom code
• Extensions
• Services

The Integration environment runs in a Linux container (LXC) on a grid of servers known as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). Each environment includes a web server and database to test your site.

Global Master

The Global Master branch is a part of the Integration environment. You should always push a copy of the Production code to the Global Master in case there is an emergent need to debug the Production environment without interrupting services.

Do not create a branch from Global Master. Use the Integration environment branch to create new, active branches.

Staging environment

The Staging environment provides a near-production environment to test your site. This environment includes all services used in the Production environment—including Fastly CDN, New Relic APM, Blackfire Profiler, and search—and shares the same dedicated IaaS hardware as the Production environment.

You cannot create a branch from the Staging environment branch. You must push code changes from the Integration environment branch to the Staging environment branch.

Production environment

The Production environment runs your public-facing Magento single and multi-site storefronts. This environment runs on dedicated IaaS hardware featuring triple-redundant, high-availability nodes for continuous access and failover protection for your customers.

You cannot create a branch from the Production environment branch. You must push code changes from the Staging environment branch to the Production environment branch.

Redundant hardware

Rather than running a traditional, active-passive master or a master-slave setup, Magento Commerce (Cloud) runs a triple-redundant architecture where all three instances accept reads and writes. This architecture offers zero downtime when scaling and provides guaranteed transactional integrity.

Because of our unique, triple-redundant hardware, we can provide you with three gateway servers. Most external services enable you to whitelist multiple IP addresses, so having more than one fixed IP address is not a problem.

The three gateways map to the three servers in your Production environment cluster and retain static IP addresses. It is fully redundant and highly available at every level:

• DNS
• Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Elastic load balancer (ELB)
• Three-server cluster comprising all Magento services, including the database and web server

Backup and disaster recovery

Your Pro plan backup and recovery approach uses a high-availability architecture combined with full-system backups. We replicate each Project—all data, code, and assets—across three separate AWS Availability Zones, each zone with a separate data center.

In addition to the redundancy of the high-availability architecture, there is a full system backup every six hours that includes the file system and the database. We retain the backups according to the following schedule:

Time Period	Backup Retention Policy
Days 1 to 3	Each backup
Days 4 to 6	One backup per day
Weeks 2 to 6	One backup per week
Weeks 8 to 12	One bi-weekly backup
Weeks 12 to 22	One backup per month

Magento Commerce (Cloud) creates the backup using snapshots to encrypted elastic block storage (EBS) volumes. An EBS snapshot is immediate, but the time it takes to write to the simple storage service (S3) depends on the volume of changes.

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO)—is 6 hours (maximum time to last backup).
• Recover Time Objective (RTO)—depends on the size of the storage. Large EBS volumes take more time to restore.

Production technology stack

The Production environment has three virtual machines (VMs) behind an Elastic Load Balancer managed by an HAProxy per VM. Each VM includes the following technologies:

• Fastly CDN—HTTP caching and CDN
• NGINX—web server using PHP-FPM, one instance with multiple workers
• GlusterFS—file server for managing all static file deployments and synchronization with four directory mounts:
  • var
  • pub/media
  • pub/static
  • app/etc
• Redis—one server per VM with only one active and the other two as replicas
• Elasticsearch—search for Magento Commerce (Cloud) 2.1 and later
• Solr—search for Magento Commerce (Cloud) 2.0 only
• Galera—database cluster with one MariaDB MySQL database per node with an auto-increment setting of three for unique IDs across every database

The following figure shows the technologies used in the Production environment:

Magento Commerce scales seamlessly from the smallest 6-CPU cluster with 11.25GB of RAM to the largest 96-CPU cluster with 180GB of RAM. Our triple-redundant architecture means we can offer upscaling without downtime. When upscaling, we rotate each of the three instances to upgrade without downtime of your site.

Software versions

Magento Commerce (Cloud) uses the Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie) operating system and the NGINX 1.8 web server. You cannot upgrade this software, but you can configure versions for the following:

• PHP
• MySQL
• Redis
• RabbitMQ
• Elasticsearch

For the Staging and Production environments, we recommend installing the Fastly CDN module 1.2.33 or later. See Fastly in Cloud.

Edit the following YAML files to configure specific software versions to use in your implementation.

• .magento.app.yaml—application build and deployment
• routes.yaml—url processing
• services.yaml—supported services
• .magento.env.yaml—unified configs for Magento Commerce (Cloud) 2.2