Opening Keynote

Transcript

Hello, everybody. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to Adobe Developers Live Commerce Edition. So I am so excited to see everybody just had a really good chat with some of the folks here in the meet and greet. We’ve got folks from all over the world here and we’ve got a really exciting lineup today. So for those who don’t know me, my name is Eric Erway. I’m the Group Product Manager for our Experiences product here with Adobe Commerce based here in Austin, Texas. I’ve been with Magento, now Adobe, for about seven years or so and I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be part of Commerce but really be part of this community. I’ll be your host today and I am again thrilled to see everybody. Hope everybody’s doing well, everybody’s doing safe and happy. And again, I’m going to introduce and be your host today and kind of walk you through what is a pretty action-packed agenda. We’ve got about 13 speakers today. We’ve got a couple topics here from product engineering and we’ve got a couple breaks. We’re going to try a couple things a little bit differently this time around. So shorter conference overall, we’ll have some networking, we’ll have some breaks. We continue to find that really just talking with one another and connecting with one another is a big part of what the community is all about. The community is more than just a product. It’s about people. And so for today, we’ll do that. And if you have any questions, by all means, let us know. We’ve got Parul and many others from Adobe who will be monitoring the chats and we’ve got a code of conduct posted as well on the Adobe Developers Live conference. And so if you have any questions, needing help, please let us know. We do have a hashtag, hashtag Adobe developers is your hashtag for today. So feel free to tweet often and let us know what you think. And we’ll also send a survey afterwards with regards to feedback. So let us know how we did. Let us know how we can do these better and we’ll continue to do more and more of these throughout the year. So again, thank you so much to everybody for attending. I hope everybody has a great conference. And with that, I’m going to hand it over to Chris Hedge, who is the Senior Director for Adobe Commerce. Hello, everybody. Welcome to Adobe Developers Live specifically for commerce. My name is Chris Hedge. I’m the Senior Director of Product Management for Commerce. I’m so excited to be able to host a Developers Live event here specifically for the Adobe Commerce and Magenta open source products. And personally, I’m thrilled to get to deliver the opening keynote for the event. I’ll admit this is the first time I’ve gotten to do a keynote for an Adobe or Adobe Commerce event like this. I’ve done a lot of roadmap presentations and other opportunities to get to meet with the community, but never really a chance to lead off an event. So I am very, very excited. And like Eric said, we’ve got some absolutely fantastic sessions coming up that I’m also excited to get to see. And hopefully all of you are as well. There is so much going on right now with the commerce products that are important for our developer community. And again, great sessions with people that are far smarter than I am that are going to go in depth to all of these great topics. So I do get to give a broad lay of the land and give a little bit of an overview about a lot of the different types of content in the different areas that you’re going to hear about this morning and this afternoon. But before we get all those other sessions underway, why are we here today? What are we here to talk about? So the developer ecosystem has always been absolutely critical to the success of Magento. And that’s no different for Adobe Commerce today. Starts with our extension marketplace where developers have created over 4000 extensions and integrations over time. With our open source core across 2021, we had over 12,000 code contributions that’s helped to improve the quality and the capability of that core code base submitted by 70 different partners and over 400 individuals that sit outside of the Adobe organization. And developers take advantage of our market leading extensibility to customize commerce experiences and core processes in order to deliver their merchants unique brand promises to their customers. In fact, we hear consistently how that flexibility is the number one reason why technical implementers select Adobe as their commerce platform of choice. So whether you’re a system integrator, you’re an extension developer, an in-house engineer, or independent implementer, you bring our product to life for our customers. You are the ones that provide the customizations that help them achieve their unique business goals. And you quite simply are what makes this product unique in the industry. So we’re here today to talk about you, the developer, and what’s important to you and what we are doing to help make your experience better and give you the ability to drive more value to your customers. So I expect that most of you out there work with Magento open source as much, if not even more than Adobe commerce. So I want to address straight off how we’re thinking about open source now and into the future. And for those of you who attended the event, you’ll recognize a lot of this particular slide from my Magento association connect session in October. Magento open source and our developer ecosystem have always been and will remain a critically important part of Adobe commerce. We’re on a journey to augment the core capabilities found in our installed code base with SaaS based services, but we have no plans to deprecate the core application code or our support for in-process customization. We have adopted a thin core strategy that’s been driven by consistent customer and partner feedback about the effort and costs associated with doing required upgrades. And as a part of that strategy, you will see that all new significant capability development done by Adobe is now being delivered outside of that traditional installed application. But it’s important to note that we will continue to deliver security compliance and high priority quality fixes to that installed code base and to the open source customer base. That does not mean that Adobe is not investing in things to help our open source customers and our open source community, or that the community has no means to contribute to the open source or Adobe commerce products. In fact, we’ve made some amazing progress in this area that I’ll talk about in just a moment. We have heard from the community about needing more frequent and transparent communication and about concerns about the Magento Association. And again, we’re committed to working with all of you across our global community to help find solutions. So that was from October. What progress has been made then in the last couple of months in this area? Well, the community wanted to hear more from us. In October, we made the commitment to be more transparent with our entire community on what things we were working on and what’s coming up soon. At that time, we unveiled a new publicly available view of our roadmap on our Dev doc site available for everybody open source community as well. The commerce team is committed to ensuring quarterly reviews of the roadmap with the community. You can see there a direct link or a QR code that will help point you to that page out on Dev docs. We recently kicked off a monthly community newsletter that started in January. Of course, events are our favorite and best way to get out there and engage with our community and to share what’s going on. And while I know speaking for the team, we would all love to be able to be there in person and get to engage truly in that one-on-one physical environment, we’re still very, very excited about the opportunities to talk virtually with a large group like this. This conference, Adobe Developers Live, specifically for commerce is our first big event focusing on more transparency with our ecosystem. Of course, we’ve got Adobe Summit coming up starting March 15th, but you can also expect to see more bite-sized conversations throughout the year as well as more Meet Magento events that will be announced soon in virtual, live, and hybrid formats. So speaking of the Magento Association, the Magento Open Source Task Force has been hard at work since we last talked. We’ve got a number of fantastic discussions that we’ve had. There’s a lot to be excited about there, but the topic I am most encouraged by personally is the planning going on around a new release strategy and contribution model. We’re exploring a new release strategy based on a long-term and short-term support model, otherwise known as LTS and STS, used by many platforms today. In this case, Adobe will continue to provide the long-term foundation for open source or the LTS version while giving the community the ownership and the flexibility to contribute, to release, and to support your own STS versions independently of Adobe resourcing, roadmap, investment. Now, we’re still working with the task force on exactly how this will work, but we’re hoping to get the plan locked soon with a rollout to follow. And early feedback from the task force has been very encouraging. Finally, we’re working with the Magento Association in support of the four pillars to better serve the community. This includes upcoming elections and membership updates. The Magento Association is also exploring new content like the Proceed to Checkout podcast and how we can expand magentoassociation.org as the new home for Magento Open Source. The commerce team at Adobe is truly excited about this reinvigorated and evolved partnership with the open source ecosystem. So, like I said, lots of things that I’m feeling encouraged by and hopefully you’re feeling encouraged by about the future of open source and the community in general. But there’s also a lot to be excited about regarding the future of our products as well, starting with our overall platform vision. If there’s one thing that the last two years have taught all of us, it’s that businesses must be adaptable to fast changing market conditions and increases in customer demand for trusted, personalized digital experiences. Consumers have increasingly turned to brands who understand their interests, needs, and preferences while protecting their privacy. That’s a tall order. At Adobe, we need to deliver new tools and an evolving platform that provides the developer ecosystem with additional flexibility when customizing, adapting and delivering those trusted, personalized digital experiences at scale and in real time to meet that ever changing demand of the customers. We call our vision for this platform evolution Commerce on Adobe Experience Cloud, a best in class, always current, composable commerce platform and our partners and merchants are already seeing the benefits of the initial stages of our evolution. As a part of Adobe, we are seeing some of the world’s biggest brands choosing to use commerce. These big brands put pressure in a very good way on our product to scale beyond what it’s ever scaled to before. We’ve got multiple customers now doing over 1 billion effective skews on our cloud platform. Last year, we increased our out of the box performance for uncached page views by 400% and order velocity by 3000% compared to the 2.3 version of the software. And we’re going to continue to make major leaps in key performance and scaling metrics in 2022. We’re also unlocking greater innovation velocity and time to value. As you all know, we release updates to the core installed commerce application about four times a year. In the second half of 2020, excuse me, after its initial general availability release, we released over 180 enhancements to our SaaS based dynamic product recommendations. And with live search also SaaS based, we’ve launched a significant feature edition just one month after our initial GA late last summer. And for our developers, moving to composable services will also provide the flexibility to combine those services in innovative new ways. While our customers love the power and flexibility of the installed software model, our platform evolution will also significantly improve total cost of ownership, which we’ll talk about in just a bit. And because we’re leveraging the power of the Adobe portfolio of products, we can do all of this while delivering market leading experience, and we’re also providing and merchandising capabilities that can help you help your merchants drive greater revenue. So what are the key components of that commerce on Adobe experience cloud platform? First, we’re going to continue to provide the widest array of options for the customer experience with our open and modular platform, exposing commerce services headless architecture. We’re introducing composable SaaS services that complement the core commerce application services that you’re accustomed to working with. We’re also partnering across Adobe experience cloud on an alternate extensibility framework that maintains our flexibility without breaking compatibility with the core. We’re helping empower our developers with new site management and reliability tools. And we continue to simplify maintenance of the installed application so that you can spend more time adding new business value and less time performing required core upgrades. It’s never been a better time to be an Adobe commerce implementer. So let’s go dig into each of these five areas and learn a little bit more. Of course, since we are part of Adobe, we always like to start our conversations with the experience. For our headless foundation, we’ll be wrapping up core b2b coverage in GraphQL in our 244 release that’s now in beta. And as we’re now API first in all of our projects, we’ll maintain full GraphQL coverage as new capabilities are delivered. We’re introducing headless support for intelligent commerce with the commerce event collection SDK that’s going to serve as the foundation for event publishing and subscription for any front end framework. With this framework, behavioral events can be used for things like training personalization models, analytics, or even sending commerce data to the Adobe experience edge, which makes it available within the Adobe experience platform, real time customer data platform, customer journey analytics, Adobe journey optimizer, and a host of other digital experience products. On top of our headless foundation, we support merchant sites that use Adobe experience manager or other digital experience platforms. We support custom front ends and micro front ends. And of course, we still support our tightly coupled responsive UI framework luma. But more so than ever before, our new customers are choosing to use our fully integrated front end as a service built on the PWA UI framework. This will be a big year for PWA as we’ll be improving the infrastructure for front end cloud hosting, as well as providing server side rendering for PWA, which will turbocharge our merchant shopper experience even more than they’ve been before. We’ll be delivering global theming capabilities using tailwind CSS and broadening our coverage with more out of the box reference UI components to help front end developers deliver new UI innovations faster. We’re improving storefront customization, you’ll be able to extend the graph qL schema to add business logic supporting UI components to build custom UI components and integrate them with PWA seamlessly using Adobe app builder. And finally, we’re enhancing designer and developer experience with the Adobe XD experience designers toolkit for commerce PWA, along with improvements to PWA studio, CI CD, and observability. As a commerce developer, you intimately know the ins and outs of our installed codebase. And while we will continue to rely on and support the installed application that you’re accustomed to, as I said earlier, we are on a journey to augment it with modern composable SaaS services that will tremendously simplify the maintenance of the commerce application. As I said earlier, they’ll also provide the flexibility for our developers to combine services in innovative new ways, or to more easily decouple and plug in third party or custom services when needed. You’ve likely already noticed that big new capabilities such as product recommendations and live search were all introduced as SaaS services. In fact, you can expect that all significant new capabilities going forward from Adobe are going to be introduced this way. At the same time, we’re beginning to build out core commerce domain services, such as catalog inventory and pricing as SaaS services. But again, this doesn’t mean the existing installed code services are going away. Those services will remain in place in the installed commerce application. In fact, we think this is going to be a key differentiator in this new architecture, we’ll still be delivering a complete commerce platform out of the box, not a bag of Lego bricks that have to be integrated together before even basic commerce functionality could be unlocked. We will allow merchants and developers the flexibility of when and how they choose to adopt the new SaaS services, or even to continue to use the existing modules in the installed code base in the event of business critical customizations that have been made there. Best of all, for those merchants that are already using headless or PWA, the GraphQL API layer will make the services transitions transparent to the experience layer. So, of course, the hallmark of Adobe Commerce has always been about providing the most flexibility and extensibility of any commerce platform today, down to the unique ability to customize the very core services that we offer. While this is extremely powerful, we know that xirping when not implemented carefully can severely impact the time and effort it takes for future upgrades. That’s why we’re excited to be collaborating across Adobe Experience Cloud on a unified developer experience and alternate extensibility framework that leverages Adobe IO and Adobe App Builder. Developers will be able to use Adobe IOs serverless runtime to host custom services or overwrite out of the box services without modifying the underlying commerce code. The new framework will maintain our flexibility without risking merchants ongoing maintenance costs. Leveraging Adobe App Builder, commerce developers will be able to build custom micro front ends that can be seamlessly integrated into the storefront or back office user experiences, extend commerce GraphQL and REST APIs via no code or low code integrations. With those of other Adobe Digital Experience products and third party APIs. And to use new commerce events to synchronize data between commerce and third party ERP, PIM, CRM, or enterprise middleware. Commerce developers will also benefit from a centralized developer experience that is common across commerce and other Adobe applications via the Adobe Developer Console to support the software development lifecycle with opinionated development and deployment tools in addition to a common extensibility model across Adobe products. This new extensibility platform will provide system integrators a better way to efficiently customize processes to integrate systems and to deploy new capabilities all while maintaining SaaS like upgradeability. And if you’re a partner and not already exploring our partner preview for our API Gateway and GraphQL service, you should definitely attend the Dev Exchange session later this morning with Nishant on the future of extensibility. All right. We’ve talked about several things that we’re excited about. That is all around turbocharging developer innovation. But we also know that being an engineer isn’t always about building sexy new business capabilities. Oftentimes, you just need to roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work of supporting your production sites. To that end, we’ve also been working on site management and reliability tools aimed at helping you be the hero when something goes awry or even better by catching it before it does. We know it can be challenging to apply a new Adobe Commerce update when your implementation has significant code customizations. The upgrade compatibility tool programmatically identifies potential places where code conflicts may occur ahead of time, making it faster and less costly to apply required upgrades. The site-wide analysis tool is like having a personal commerce support rep sitting on your team. It provides end-to-end analysis of your site and provides recommendations around configurations, performance, or third-party extensions to improve your site health. Observability for Adobe Commerce presents insights from log data across the entire stack against a common timeline to help you detect potential errors with application architecture, scale, or performance and quickly see usage stats, errors, and alerts thresholds so that you can proactively address potential problems. But best of all, all three of these tools are available now for use. And we’re continuing to improve them all the time based on feedback from our developer community. Finally, we hear extensive feedback from merchants and partners about the need to lighten core releases. I touched on this at the very beginning. And to reduce the time and effort associated with site maintenance. So along with tools like the upgrade compatibility tool, we continue to make it faster and easier to perform required upgrades. First, as I mentioned previously, you’ll see no more significant feature development delivered via core application releases. We’ll also be making greater use of the quality patch tool to deliver non-essential core changes, including community contributions outside of the required version upgrades. And as a result of decoupling all other development from the core, we’ve been able to start streamlining our core release strategy. This has given us the ability to make some important adjustments to upcoming end of support timelines that you’ll want to learn more about. And speaking of releases, Adobe Commerce and Magento open source version 2.4.4 is coming soon and is going to provide merchants with a significant performance boost coming from PHP 8.1, which replaces PHP 7.4, which is going to reach end of support in November of 2022. This is a big update, and it’s going to be an important one to get out on your merchant sites as quickly as possible. You can use the QR code below to visit our blog, where we talk about these changes in more detail. Or more simply, stay tuned for Smita’s session coming up later today, all on simplifying the upgrade process. All right, so there is a ton to read about and to learn more about there. But again, I’ve only hit the highlights of what’s going on with our developer experience and our platform evolution for Adobe Commerce. Fortunately, there are several fantastic sessions on the agenda today covering developer tools, simplifying upgrades, headless innovations, quality and health tools, and our new commerce solutions that are available in the next few weeks. We’ve also got a great forum for open discussion on topics like the future of open source and our extensibility platform, coming in about 30 minutes with our developer exchange. So I hope you’re as excited about Adobe Developers Live specifically for commerce as I am. And again, thank you for joining me this morning. Now, I think we have some time left. I’m happy to answer some questions in the chat. Or turn it back over to Eric. So again, thank you for your time today. Let’s see. So thank you to Eric and Chris. Looks like we’ve been handling a lot of the chat for me while that’s going on. And a lot of love for LTS-STS strategy being developed. Very happy to see that. And love for SSR and Tailwind. I know Eric’s smiling. Eric’s very excited about those. Any idea of how long the LTS release will be supported? I don’t know, Eric, if you have anything to comment on there. I don’t know that we’ve talked about specifics like that. I think the key, though, that I want to reiterate is that there are no planned EOL open source or get rid of that installed software model. And so the idea is that we’re going to be able to do that in a way that’s not that installed software model. And so the idea is that Adobe will continue to keep the open source or even the on-prem version of the paid product up to date. Appliance and security updates on a regular basis. Eric, anything more you want to add there? No. I think you’ve got it right. I mean, we want to be as transparent as we can. And that does mean kind of sharing some of the in-progress work that we’ve done with the open source task force. In general, we don’t want to reinvent process. We’ve got some really great models that we’re exploring around STS and LTS. And that’s the general time frame. The other part, too, is that there’s going to be commonality amongst the solutions that we’re talking about here. And so things like Tailwind and others, it’s good to have choice and flexibility in what we’re doing. And yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So good questions, what we’re seeing here in chat. Question about Luma and if that fits into the LTS. And Chris said yes. Just like the overall installed software model, we do not have a plan to EOL or stop supporting Luma. We are throwing our investment and a lot of that work in the UI front into PWA. That’s where we’ll see the innovation. But we’re not getting rid of Luma right now. We’ll continue to make sure that that is safe and secure. Yeah, I think a good way to look at this, and Igor really simplified it recently, when you think about LTS, it’s really Magenta open source as we know it. That is the release. STS, though, is going to allow for some experimentation and really to allow the community to take some ownership on what this looks like, how it’s released, et cetera. So there’s a lot of work. And we have to establish how this all looks like from a compatibility perspective and all that. But I think that’s a good way to look at it, though. LTS is really going to be familiar in terms of how you’ve worked with Magenta open source, commerce, et cetera. STS is really the new for that one. So it’s a good way to think about it. But I think that really simplified it for a lot of folks when they heard about it. Yeah. Good call out for the site-wide analysis tool for on-prem. I know we’ve got a session coming up that’ll talk more about that with Smita and Sergey and Mark. But yes, that is coming now. So good evolution there with site-wide analysis tools and some of those other great support tools. Good tools, good improvements around headless, yes. Eric, do you have a thought how often we see our merchants really looking for headless, not counting headless done through PWA, but how often are we seeing third-party UI frameworks or using AEM or other non-Adobe commerce heads at this point? Yeah, it’s a good question. We’re seeing it in well over half of the opportunities that we see with merchants, customers, but also partners. And so it’s a big topic. It allows for a lot of flexibility. And that’s not just an option. We’re seeing a lot of great frameworks out there, like KUVA, but also others that really take advantage of the headless capabilities with the net new GraphQL that Christian and others are driving with the team. And so it’s become really, really popular. We’re seeing it help customers push the limits on what can often be a static commerce experience. And we’re seeing some really interesting examples of that. So yeah, well over half for sure. There’s a lot of demand. And with that comes great responsibility. That’s new frameworks to learn, training, et cetera. But that’s OK. Yeah. So Robert Rand asked about the extension developers losing access to Adobe Commerce dev licenses. Robert, that is something that we are continuing to work here. It’s about fitting our existing, our legacy, if you will, partner processes into Adobe’s partner approach. I know that is taking longer than we would all like. But it is something that we are still trying to work on to make sure that everyone can have access for building extensions for both the paid versions and the open source versions. And then Peter asked about, so LTS doesn’t mean a stable core and only security fixes. I may be simplifying it a little bit. I mean, to me, that’s what we’re talking about here is Adobe’s responsibility with the open source core is about maintaining stability and security. And I’ll throw in maintaining PCI compliance. And the idea there with the community-owned STS versions is that can be where community authored, community developed new innovations and things can live. So we are very much focusing on, again, the idea of keeping our core updates as thin as possible and making that easier and easier to take those security updates and all. So to me, that’s a big part of the idea of what LTS is about for us is stability, lighter updates, security compliance only. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right, Chris. And I think this is very consistent with what you shared a couple of months ago around really our lean focus on the core and really getting to really the critical needs there. But again, with that opening up STS for maybe some of the new and interesting things that we could pick and bring into LTS at the right time. So that’s the flexibility that we wanted. So let’s take maybe one more question here. And I want to make sure that we give time for Parash here to get started here, speaking of tools and toolkits and such. And so do we have any more questions before we hand it over to Parash? Robert asked about any other anticipated Adobe commerce features coming to Magento open source. Nothing to announce at this time. It is something that we consider several times throughout the year looking at capabilities that have been paid previously that we don’t see as something that we want to be a paid differentiator. Like with the case of Page Builder, we think that that really became that idea of a drag and drop business friendly editor became table stakes for something that every base level e-commerce platform should offer. And that’s why we wanted to make sure that it was a part of the open source base. And so we do make those changes periodically. We don’t have a specific roadmap looking far ahead and slotting those types of changes. It’s more of a, like I said, periodically looking at the state of the market and the state of our code base and re-evaluating things a couple of times throughout the year. Yep. And the open source roadmap will be a really nice guide for that. I know some of those I think are extensions of current capabilities. But you’ll see net new pop up under that over time as we update that quarterly. Well, great. Thank you so much. I think I get a chance to come back and chat with everybody a little bit later this afternoon. Enjoy, again, a really, really fantastic slate of topics here. I think it’s going to be a fantastic day. So everyone enjoy that. Great. Thank you so much for joining us, Chris. And then, yeah, we’ll talk to you soon. So thanks again.