Cloud Plan Differences

Magento Commerce Cloud offers two plans: Starter and Pro. Understanding their differences is crucial for exam success and proper architecture decisions.

Why Isolation Matters

Merchants on Cloud Pro are isolated into their own environments. This provides critical benefits:

• No Collateral Damage: One merchant's "go-live" or issues cannot take down another merchant
• Dedicated Resources: Each merchant has dedicated AWS instances
• Performance Isolation: Traffic spikes don't affect other merchants
• Security Isolation: Each environment is completely separate

Starter Plan - No Isolation

Starter plans use shared hosting:

• Multiple merchants on same infrastructure
• One merchant's issues can potentially affect others
• Shared resources mean potential performance impact
• Cost-effective for smaller stores and development

Starter Plan: 3 Integration Branches

Starter allows for 3 testing environments (integration branches):

• master (production)
• staging
• Up to 2 active integration branches

You can create unlimited branches in git, but only 2 integration branches can be active (deployed environments) at a time.

Pro Plan: 1 Integration + 4 Active Branches

Pro contains 1 integration environment with capacity for 4 more active branches:

• master (production)
• staging
• integration (base environment)
• Up to 4 active development branches off integration

Total: 5 development/testing environments (1 integration + 4 active branches).

Starter Plan Code Flow

Code in Cloud Starter navigates:

• Active branch (integration environment) is where development happens
• Merge to staging for testing
• Staging automatically merges to master (production)
• 3-tier structure

Pro Plan Code Flow

Code in Cloud Pro navigates:

• Active branch is a child of integration
• Merge active branch to integration
• Merge integration to staging for testing
• Staging to master (production)
• 4-tier structure

Starter: Branch from staging

• staging is the primary branch from which you create integration branches
• master is automatically updated from staging
• Work happens on integration branches created from staging

Pro: Branch from integration

• integration is the base environment for development
• All active development branches are children of integration
• Must branch from integration, not staging
• More structured and protected workflow

Starter Infrastructure

• Shared hosting on AWS infrastructure
• Single server per environment
• Cost-effective for development and smaller stores
• No fault tolerance

Pro Infrastructure

• Dedicated AWS instances
• Three server setups for fault tolerance (3 nodes)
• High availability and redundancy
• Better performance and scalability
• Load balanced across nodes

Cloud Pro includes the B2B module:

• Still requires manual installation via Composer (like on-premise)
• Not automatically enabled, but included in license
• Available for both Starter and Pro, but Pro includes it in the plan

Installation

composer require magento/extension-b2b
bin/magento module:enable Magento_B2b
bin/magento setup:upgrade

Regardless of plan, data flow is opposite to code flow:

• Production is the source of truth for data
• Sync/refresh data from production to lower environments
• Same concept for both Starter and Pro

Choose Starter When:

• Development or staging site
• Smaller store with lower traffic
• Budget-conscious project
• Testing or proof-of-concept
• 2 active development environments are sufficient

Choose Pro When:

• Production-level store
• Enterprise or high-traffic site
• Need environment isolation
• Require fault tolerance (3 nodes)
• Need more active development environments (5 total)
• B2B functionality required

Starter Environment Structure

master (production)
  └── staging
       ├── integration-1 (active)
       └── integration-2 (active)

Pro Environment Structure

master (production)
  └── staging
       └── integration
            ├── active-branch-1
            ├── active-branch-2
            ├── active-branch-3
            └── active-branch-4

• Magento Commerce Cloud Architecture
• Starter Architecture
• Pro Architecture
• Starter Workflow
• Pro Workflow