Benefits of upgrading to Adobe Commerce 2.4.4

Transcript

Okay, let’s open it up.

Good afternoon, good morning. Welcome to the second in our new webinar series for our commerce customers across Asia Pacific. We have Adobe team members here in the session from across the region and also from the US today. But as I’m joining from Sydney, Australia, I’m going to start in the Australian tradition with an acknowledgement to country. We acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora nation as the traditional custodians of the country we are meeting on today. We pay our respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to all First Nations people present today. So the topic today is upgrading to the new release of two point four point four. It’s important to stay up to date on the platform, of course, for a number of reasons. And this release provides a lot of benefits immediately, as well as setting the scene for a lot of value coming through the platform in the future. I know that some of you are in the process of upgrading already and from others I’ve heard you’re planning towards it, too. We’re privileged to have two senior leaders from Adobe Commerce globally joining us from the US today. Nicole Cornelson is senior director for engineering and Shane Herman is senior director for customer engineering and support. And I just want to acknowledge it’s a late evening in Austin, so really grateful for that for their time joining from that time zone. Before we start, we have a team on hand to answer any questions in the chat pod. So please do post any questions as we go through and we will answer in line. We should also have some time at the end and we’ll try to surface some of those some of those questions for live answers and feedback. We also will have a short survey feedback survey before we close out and it would be great to capture your feedback. In fact, I think we may just post one of those questions to begin with, which is around whether you’re planning towards the upgrade currently. And so, Safir, if you could just post that poll as we go through. And Nicole, thank you again for joining this evening and I’ll hand over to you. Thank you so much, Ben. I am very privileged to be here, excited to be talking about our upgrade path. We have a lot of content to get to, so I’m just going to get right to that. And I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to address questions as we go, like Ben said. So next slide, please. OK, so just a kind of high level overview, right? We want to talk a little bit about what is Adobe Commerce. Adobe Commerce is fully featured commerce platform. It can drive end to end B2C, D2C and B2B shopping experiences. We consider the platform highly extensible through modular architecture and it enables you to tailor your platform to best serve your customers. We have a lot of capabilities around customization and our Cut comprehensive REST API allows merchants to integrate into their existing technology infrastructure. And our GraphQL API enables integration with various heads or storefronts, PWAs, CMS, etc. Systems like Adobe Commerce that are extensible do require planning for upgrades. These upgrades keep your store secure, performant and reliable. And because the platform allows you to highly customize your stores, you will also need to verify the compatibility of your extensions and customizations with these target upgrade versions. Next slide, please. All right, so why upgrade? Well, we kind of introed it in the last slide, but upgrading primarily provides you with platform enhancements to meet the changing needs of your business. As we release upgrades to Adobe Commerce, we also release increased security, improved performance, improved quality and new features that are among the many benefits to upgrading your platform. We release security, performance and quality updates to the core code via our patch releases, and we release new features as independent modules via feature releases. Performance especially can have an outsized and cumulative impact if upgrading is delayed. For an example, every second of latency that has been shown to reduce conversion rate by 7 percent and page speed is a leading SEO ranking factor. So taking advantage of each and every release is in the best interest of every business. Another quick stat that might be helpful. 83 percent of security incidents occur on outdated software, and IBM estimates the average cost of a data breach costing in the millions. Next slide, please. As far as 244 goes, Adobe Commerce 244 marks a new step forward in commerce capabilities. The innovation in this commerce release set the foundation for the next several years of Adobe Foundations. It’s also built on the newest version of PHP 8.1, and it enables customers to future proof their digital commerce businesses. Next slide, please. And we’re going to talk a little bit now about Adobe Commerce 244 benefits. So Adobe Commerce 244 is built on the latest technologies, as we mentioned, PHP 8.1, boost site stability and ensure you remain secure, performant and compliant now and into the future. Well, how does that future proof? Well, new functionality is delivered through independent modular services rather than through core code updates. We have innovations that are released in this 244 release. We continue to build on our leadership and headless commerce by increasing GraphQL API coverage. We have B2B and admin features in this release, and we added adding personalized content and promotions to PWA studio. Adobe Commerce 244 also unlocks access to innovative merchandising, B2B commerce, experience management, payment and cloud functionality. And I think as we’ve touched on before, we’ve added with 244 more improvements around performance. It’s scalable and fast and confidently handles complex catalogs up to 10 times larger than before and five times more transaction volumes. Next slide, please. OK, a little bit more detail on why to upgrade by upgrading to version 244 or higher. You’ll be ensuring 244. You’ll be ensuring that your business stays resilient in the ever changing commerce industry. Let’s take a deeper dive into how to for the two for line enables you to future proof your digital commerce business on the future proof. On the future proof side, it’s easier and more cost effective maintenance upgrades to the core code, less frequent upgrades moving forward, meaning you’ll have more time and money to put towards other initiatives. Getting to 244 at your earliest convenience also means you’re going to stay up, stay supported longer as this version will be supported through November of 2024. It also allows faster access to innovative features delivered as software as a service that will allow you to adapt to market trends and doesn’t impact your ability to fully customize your site to meet your unique business needs. Adobe also features innovations in this release. We are making frequent improvements to functionality to help elevate experiences, increase sales and help achieve operational excellence. We offer tools that monitor the platform, health and security. We also offer in 244 personalization at scale. We have AI powered product recommendations and search features that allow the merchant to tailor buying experience for each customer, speed up product discovery and increase conversion rates. As we mentioned before, additional GraphQL coverage of admin and B2B functionality combined with new PWA studio personalization and promotions support to make headless implementations easier. We allow merchants to engage with both B2B and B2C buyers with superior commerce experience all in one platform, as well as operating the business efficiently with capabilities such as asset and inventory management and improved purchase approval workflows and payment services. We also provide tooling such as our site wide analysis tool to provide you with real time insights on your platform health. 244, as we’ve talked about, offers a significant boost in performance that will make your site more stable and more scalable. Next slide, please. A few more details around scale and performance improvements. We have released with 244 asynchronous order processing, which allows for five times the transaction volume, meaning up to 60,000 orders per hour. Other enhancements have increased the catalog size we support by 10 times compared to previous versions. This means we now support up to 200 million ESKUs and 750 items in cart with an average API response time of 300 milliseconds. With all that comes more stability. 32% improvement in site health index scores from site wide analysis tool and 34% lower chance of experiencing site outages. Next slide, please. We know the upgrade process can be challenging for many merchants as upgrades increase the TCO total cost of ownership. So we looked at our release strategy for 2022 and we were committed to making changes that reduce TCO and make it easier for you to keep your platform up to date. First, we will be reducing the complexity of the core application by releasing new features as independent services separated from the core code like we did with live search and recommendations. Secondly, we’re committed to simplifying our release schedule. In 2022, we’re reducing our core application releases, also referred to as patch releases, to two releases so that it’s simpler and easier to take the upgrades. Lastly, to make our schedules simpler and more predictable, we’ll be updating our lifecycle policy to align Adobe Commerce end of support dates with PHP end of life dates. Next slide, please. As you upgrade to versions 244 or higher in 2022, you’re setting your business up for success. We will be releasing core upgrades less often. There will be fewer upgrades to plan and budget for, which will free up your time and budget for initiatives that help your business evolve. Aligning our lifecycle policy to the PHP end of life policy will maximize the amount of time you are supported on a new version. Overall, this means you’ll spend less time and money on future upgrades to the core and receive updates to the SaaS features you have installed with minimal effort. Next slide. A few more examples around thinning the core and less complexity. We have been focusing efforts on releasing new features as independent modules, which makes the core code less complex. Some have been released as external modules, such as multi-source inventory, and others as extensions, such as product recommendations. This strategy allows us to increase innovation by releasing features outside of our core application release windows. It also reduces the complexity of the core application overall, which in turn will make future upgrades simpler. Next slide, please. Here is an example of our release schedule. This has been publicly available since late last year. And in fact, on June 21st, which was yesterday, we had one of our mid-cycle releases, which featured a lot of updates to our SaaS modules, which in turn will not require a core update, a core upgrade. We will have feature releases every other month throughout the year. These are updates to features delivered as independent services that are separate from the code, and new features will be released as external modules. We have 244 and 245 that will be released in April and August, respectively, and our two patch releases will be offered in 2022. For the last patch release of next year with the holiday season in mind, we are keeping things light and releasing a security patch for 245 to keep customers secure and PCI compliant. Next slide. And a little bit more about our updated lifecycle policy for quality support. Adobe Commerce, as we know, is built on PHP, a popular third-party scripting language. New versions of PHP are released annually in November and are supported for three years. Adobe periodically updates the version Commerce is built on to maintain support and PCI compliance. But unfortunately, moving to new version of PHP typically involves more significant updates. In an effort to make our schedule simpler and more predictable, we have updated the lifecycle policy for quality support and shifted our end of quality support dates so they align with the end of the year. If you want more information on how we’re adapting to the PHP lifecycle, all of this information will be provided to you for reference after this webinar. There’s some more details here around the lifecycle policy. We can review two different components that make up the policy, quality support and security support. It is important to note the distinction between the two. We just walked through lifecycle policy change that only applies to quality support and it’s important to note that our security support has not changed. So to quickly recap what we talked about, if your version is still supported, you can search for quality patches via our quality patch tool or reach out to our support team for help. In terms of security support, it’s important for your partner engineering team to keep upgrades top of mind and in maintenance plans because you can only receive the latest security updates if you regularly upgrade to the latest patch or security patch. Next slide, please. Just a few notes, events at a glance. As we talked about, April was our 244 GA, September will be our 2.3 end of service and November will cover 2.4.0 to 2.4.3 end of service. The 244 release is in April, which will have breaking changes, including the upgrade to PHP 8.1 and then 203 reaches EOL on September 8th of 22. We will again post and make available the new lifecycle policies so that if you have questions to reference in the future, that will be easy to do. Okay, streamlining release types, patch releases, security patch releases and feature releases. I think we’ve covered most of this in detail, but if there is an opportunity during this webinar to ask questions or have more detail that needs to be requested, we can certainly review that. Next slide. All right, now, quality patches for Adobe Commerce. When customers raise issues through support tickets, our customer engineering team will often create and distribute fixes as individual patches. In the past, identifying available patches and receiving them required engaging with Adobe Support. With the introduction of the quality patch tool for Adobe Commerce, merchants no longer have to open support tickets to find and apply individual quality fixes. Quality patches is a composer package that provides a way for merchants to know all the quality patches that are available for their installed version and apply or revert them. This gives self-service access to resolve issues more quickly. Again, along with the issues about lifecycle, there’s a lot of detail here. We do have some more available information that we will be making available throughout this webinar. And with that, we have reached the section on 2022 recommended upgrade paths. Which is the next slide. And I will turn it over to my coworker, Shane Herman. Thank you so much for your time today. We’ll be available for answering questions. Thank you so much. Good day, everybody. We’re going to talk a little bit about some of the things to consider to support you during your transition for 2.4.4. So to support you with this upgrade, we’ve made three changes to our schedules and offerings to provide you with more time and flexibility when planning to upgrade for 2.4.4. First, we’ve shifted our end of support date for 2.3 to September 8th of this year. This will provide customers on 2.3 with additional time to upgrade. Even with this additional time, we encourage you to upgrade at your earliest convenience so that you can get on a version that is PCI compliant and access all the new benefits that Nicole was talking about that come with 2.4.4 as soon as possible. Next, with this new end of support date, we’re adding two security patches for 2.3.7 and 2.4.3 to our release calendar in August. This will help all of your customers stay secure and become PCI compliant and maintain PCI compliance while they’re still under support. And lastly, we’re providing new extended support offerings for customers on versions that use PHP 7.4. Those versions are 2.3.7 and 2.4.0 through 2.4.3. This option will give you an additional year after the version end of support date to upgrade to 2.4.4 or higher while continuing to receive quality fixes and security patches. One thing that’s important to note here is that when you’re purchasing extended support, is that purchasing extended support by itself may not necessarily keep you PCI compliant, but it will ensure that you have additional security measures in place to handle that security. So next slide, please. So there’s different options depending on the path that you’re on. So if you’re currently on 2.3 today or lower, of course, we highly recommend going towards 2.4.4. However, if you are in the lower version of 2.3, this can be a time consuming upgrade that requires planning. And if you haven’t started that planning, as you’re facing coming up into the holiday season, you do have an alternate option, which is to look at upgrading to 2.3.7. And so our recommended path, if you can’t go for 2.4.4 right now, would be to go for 2.3.7 and making sure you’re on one of the latest security releases. As I mentioned here in August, we’ll be releasing the latest security patch there to make sure that you can be available for extended support. But again, we’re always recommending 2.4.4 if you can, if you’re in that planning phase today. Next slide, please. And then, of course, if you’re on 2.3.7 already today, you do have a direct pass. It might be a little bit easier for you to make that jump to 2.4.4. We’re going to talk about some tools to help you with that upgrade here in a minute. But also, you should have an easy path here as well for 2.3.7 to pick up the latest security patch here in August. And then you’ll have an availability to either be considered for extended support to get to the holiday season. And or from that point as well, you could move directly to 2.4.5 when it came out if you’re coming in on a later release date. Next slide, please. And then for all of you customers that are on 2.4, thanks so much for adopting our 2.4 line. And so you also do have some options here. So if you’re currently on 2.4, we highly recommend going to one of our, of course, 2.4.4. But if you cannot make that timeline, then we do have the option to go to one of our 2.4.3 latest security releases. So we would recommend going to our 2.4.3 P2 or P3 release so that you can maintain that extended support and then have an option to bridge into either 2.4.4 or 2.4.5 when you’re ready. Next slide. And then, you know, very similar here, you know, with 2.4.3, sorry about that, was kind of talking about 2.4.0 there before, but again, 4.2.4.3, you know, very similar kind of options here, kind of going into the latest security release or, you know, moving straight into 2.4.4 or 2.4.5. Next slide. And then, you know, some of the things that we’re proud of working with the engineering team and customer engineering team is that we’ve started to make tools available for your developers and partners to make that upgrade easier. And so one of these tools that we’ll like to talk about here is the upgrade compatibility tool. So upgrade compatibility tool is a command line tool integrated into your developers platform for PHP store. And it has the ability to, you know, check some of those code compatibility issues and analyze all those things that you might consider that might be, you know, critical things to handle as you’re going into an upgrade. And takes all that information and summarizes it into an easy digestible report for you to understand maybe what the amount of issues or complexity would be for that upgrade. And so that tool is available for all of our Adobe Commerce customers. It is now compatible with PHP 8.1 and has all the latest information for 2.4.4. So if you’re trying to compare your different upgrade paths, it’ll give you all those details. We have some links in here that you can view after the webinar on how to use the upgrade compatibility tool and also some video details about that as well. Additionally, if you are a current user of our site-wide analysis tool that we offer for our cloud customers as well as on-premise customers on 2.4, we’ve integrated the upgrade compatibility tool into the site-wide analysis tool so you can easily do a one-click report from there. So you have two options for using this tool, either through the command line or through our site-wide analysis tool, which is fully integrated. And some little visualizations here to kind of show you what some examples of these reports look like. Next slide, please. So as you’re considering going through the upgrade process, there’s different general factors that could affect the level of effort for your project. So some of those things to consider around the technical complexity, the extent of the customizations that we have applied, sort of the number of those extensions or customizations, your different integrations that you have, and some of how your developers have been following some of those coding best practices along the way. And again, as you’re thinking about the upgrade planning and strategy, be definitely thinking about the clarity of requirements and how some of that scope creep could impact your upgrade timelines, considering the different versions you’re upgrading from and to, and always be considering that at frequency. As Nicole said, between these major releases, there are performance enhancements, security enhancements that can add value to your business. Then of course, a continuous testing strategy is always key. So if you’re working with your developers and your partners, be talking to them about how they can be doing more automated testing through your different releases that you’re working on throughout the year. Next slide, please. So while the level of effort, this is an art and a science. And so what we tried to do here is give you a little bit of a guide on looking at your current version that you’re currently on and the version you’re targeting and giving some type of level of effort so you can kind of gauge that level of effort. And so I won’t kind of talk through all these different bullet points, but it kind of gives you a different level of magnitude of effort based on some of our experiences with our partners and our consulting team. So you can see here, just from the top of the chart, going from a lower release, lower than 237 to 244, it’s most likely going to require the most effort. There’s a lot of breaking changes with PHP and other things happening in this release and the length of time that you’ve had between those releases, depending on, again, some of those other factors we talked about around customization and cutting best practices. And then of course, hopefully, as you’re more you want a newer release like 243, hopefully that effort is a little bit lower for yourself. And again, we’ve kind of given some fair range of time here with our consulting services team based on sites that are not highly customized, really worked on coding best practices. We’ve seen upgrades from the 2.3 to 243 take around 9 to 12 weeks from beginning to end. Next slide. So some of the things that we’d like to just highlight out here for top tips for upgrading is, again, thinking about that continuous upgrade mindset, thinking at least twice a year about adopting one of our security releases and then one of our major performance and feature releases. Please do consider working with your development partners on using things like the upgrade compatibility tool and some of these quality patch tools that we’re offering to help with those overall upgrade processes. And as Nicole mentioned, we’re moving a lot of some of our functionality out of the core and moving it to these consumable services. And so as you do that, and please do consider what those services that you can consume there and trying to limit the number of extensions that you’re using. And if you are using extensions, that’s a great thing as well. But make sure you’re getting reputable companies that are providing those extensions and that they’re supporting our core release strategy. And as much as you can consider talking to your developers about how they’re separating out their customized code and how they’re using APIs and how they’re working now as we move to 244 and how they plan to be working with our more consumable services on the commerce side. And one of the last things that we leave with that we talked about before as well is continue to see how your development partners can use more automated testing along the process so that the overall testing does not kind of technical debt doesn’t pile up over time. So you’re not kind of faced with how much time it’s going to take to test between releases. So with that, next slide, please. Again, we want to just leave you some resources. These are a lot of some great resources we’ll leave behind that you’ll be shared out. But we have some very detailed guides on the 2.4 upgrade guide, some other comprehensive upgrade resources for yourselves and your developers. We have a recorded workshop that was presented with Adobe and Merkle on upgrading and getting more into those details, as well as some of our capabilities that we shared before some of our tools like the upgrade compatibility tool and also how to access that tool from our site-wide analysis tool. And of course, our Adobe release calendar for all of our releases. So with that, I’m going to hand it back to Ben and the team, and maybe we can go to some questions and answers and support the panel questions that come up there.

That was fantastic. Thank you, Nicole. Thank you, Shane. Some really good overview of why it’s important to upgrade, what’s coming in our roadmap coming down the next few months as well, as well as some best practice around the upgrading. So some really great stuff coming through. And we do have some questions coming through in the chat. I’m going to surface some of these. I know there’s been some answers going on already. There’s been some questions around the end of support for 2.3. So if you’re on 2.4.3 currently, do you need to upgrade to 2.4.4 by September? And I think the answer was that you have until November this year for that one. Is the upgrade tool free and accessible from Magento Admin? And great to see that that is free and available to use. And there’s some documentation in the chat that you can download or you can get access to for the upgrade compatibility tool. Let me just check and see some of the other questions coming through. Sophia, thank you for triggering the feedback survey there too.

Here’s a question from Sothan. Will the newer versions also support APIs for Recommendation Engine and Live Search? Yeah, so the Recommendation Engine and Live Search are both some of our SaaS modules. So the way that works is if you would like to, if you have a commerce license and you’re ready to enable recommendations for Live Search, there is an extension that you install that we provide and then that will flow the data and make the capability available. We also have an SDK package that will allow you to basically enable on your storefront API connectivity for the recommender and Live Search. But all of that is updated and maintained by our team in Adobe Commerce. So it’s your typical SaaS solution 24-7 support and everything on their API is backward compatible for those particular offerings.

That’s great. Thank you, Nicole. Next question. How likely is it that a customer who’s on the 2.4 line and installs the security patch will maintain PCI compliance with extended support? Yeah, so I’ll try to answer that one out here, which is if the customer picks up our 2.4.3 P3 security patch release, they will have access to all of our latest security patches. And additionally to that, if they purchase our extended support or the account team works with the customer to get our extended support, we will also be providing support, extended support for PHP 7.4. So if there’s anything that is PHP 7.4 security related and the customer is on our cloud, so I have to qualify that for our cloud customers only, we will be including PHP 7.4 support. So for our Commerce cloud customers, I feel like we’re doing everything to maintain the security of PHP, the security code and the infrastructure. So it’ll depend on their PCI audit, their compliance. But so I would say they’re in the best shape they can be with having received the latest code configuration on cloud. Of course, if you’re on premise, there might be other factors to consider there based on the infrastructure and the different supporting components underlying the software.

Absolutely. Thank you, Shane.

I don’t see any other questions in the chat, but I’ll just provide a further minute, a couple of minutes for any questions to be raised here. This is a great opportunity to have your questions around the 2.4.4 upgrade answered here. Here’s a question. How compatible is 2.4.4 with PHP 8.1? And should I expect to find PHP 8.1 issues in the core 2.4.4 during migration? Well, as we have released 2.4.4 with 8.1 compatibility, we certainly don’t expect to find issues. Now, what’s inside PHP 8.1 specifically is out of our control, but we definitely put it all through our rigorous testing and our ability to try to find any issues. These kinds of upgrades take the Adobe Commerce team multiple months, and then we take it through our proper regression cycles and bug fix cycles as well. So while we aren’t guaranteeing what’s in 8.1, we certainly have put it through its paces. The work on the PHP 8.1 upgrade started as soon as it was available to us in early release late last year, and we went through all of our regular cycles updating the code. So certainly let us know if there are issues, but we haven’t seen anything reported, but we have regular capability to take those feedbacks, etc., if things are coming up after release.

Definitely. From a support perspective, I would definitely agree with Nicole around the core compatibility of PHP 8.1. One of the things that you should be thinking about, though, is some of your extension providers talking to your extension provider, making sure that those extensions are compatible with PHP 8.1. There have been some extension providers that are just releasing things just as we speak or later this summer. So there is some delay in that extension provider community around PHP 8.1 support. That’s great. Thank you. There’s a further question. Would you extend support for 2.4.3 beyond September? I think we covered that that support goes until November, and I don’t envisage any further extension to that beyond November. Shane and Nicole, please correct me if that’s incorrect, but that’s my understanding. It’s not going to go beyond November. Correct. We’ve extended to November. Then, of course, if you work with your account team on Adobe Commerce, there’s an extended support option that can be added on to get that support for the year beyond November. Ben, I have a question or maybe a prompt, but I understand the API mesh beta was released a couple of days ago. So maybe we could do a 30-second elevator pitch on that and then further to that, do you need to be on 2.4.4 to make the most of that? Yeah, that’s a good question. I believe we go back at least to 2.4.3 on that, but I need to double check the documentation. We have released the GraphQL mesh API. So the way to think about this one, we have basically created and hosted the ability to allow a multi-tenant GraphQL. So basically we can have one GraphQL API to rule them all, and that actual orchestration layer will then allow for multiple API calls below that API. So the whole idea here is just making an interface that’s super simple, constantly up to date, backwards compatible, and multi-tenant so that as you try to, or as you integrate with other systems and you have other APIs to call, that we take some of that kind of work away and then GraphQL mesh is very simple in the standard GraphQL language. So this is just released into beta. We have several partners using it already. We are definitely looking for feedback. You should have seen some documentation coming via Twitter, via email, via docs releases. We can definitely provide it through this channel as well, but there’s an opportunity there to enroll in the beta program, and we are definitely looking for feedback on that. And the version number, I’ll just double check. I just don’t know right off the top of my head. We usually go towards a more current release, but not maybe just the most recent release when we do some of our SaaS offerings so that we can get some uptake and adoption.

Good? Exciting, yes. Okay. A few more questions coming through. If more customization is made, I understand it involves difficulty to upgrade, but if PCI compliance is getting through third parties, then from 2.4 to 2.4 upgrade is mandatory. I’m not sure if I fully understand that, but the 2.4 will be necessary because of the PHP change. Is there anything further you’d want to add onto that? I don’t think so. Yeah, I think that’s what, you know, essentially what we’re saying with 2.4.4 is we’re, you know, we’re, you know, have all the latest security fixes enhancements, and then all the technology stack that we’re using is in support and with security compliance. So that’s the key thing there. Of course, PHP 8.1 being one of those key components. Great. Here’s a good one in terms of how to upgrade. Shane, maybe this one’s for you. We’re using 233 version, very old. Currently planning to migrate to 2.4.4. Is it safe to upgrade directly? The website is totally custom made. We’ve informed the developer to upgrade it as soon as possible. Sure. Well, safe is always an interesting word, but yeah, I think it’s safe, but it certainly can be complex, right? And so we would definitely recommend, you know, checking out our upgrade compatibility tool, having those developers look at that and doing some analysis to work through those, you know, any of those complexities. We definitely would recommend moving from, you know, 233 to something like a 2.4.4. And if for any reason, if there are some, you have some, again, custom issues and you’re running into anything around PHP 8.1, then as we mentioned before, it might be a good path for you to look at going from 233 to 243 P3, you know, something that’s still right before that. And then kind of working through all those issues and then depending on your situation, looking at 245 when you’re ready.

Good stuff. Thank you.

I don’t see any other questions coming through currently, so I’ll just give it another minute.

We definitely appreciate any questions. Don’t be shy. We have engineering and support out here, so we’ll try to answer the best we can.

Okay, here’s a good question. How soon will we be able to see how the 2.5 upgrade looks like? Yeah. You know, we’re heading into the 2.4 line discussion, and I really can’t comment on 2.5 yet. We have yet to determine when we’re going to be looking at that and making sure that we’re getting to the point where we’re going to be able to see how the upgrade looks like. And making sure that, you know, when we talk about major upgrades like that, we want to be very conscientious about backwards compatibility, etc. So we don’t have a date for 2.5 at this time, and that’s really the answer that we’re going with right now. I don’t know, Shane, you’ve heard anything different, but as far as from the product team, we’re not looking at 2.5 yet.

That’s correct. So once again, it’s really great to have Nicole and Shane, you know, adding, answering the questions directly from the team that have been creating the platform and creating the tooling around the platform as well. So again, we’ll just give it a further minute for any last questions coming through.

I’m trying to get Aaron to answer out there about Composer, so we’ll see if Ivan can help answer that one.

So I’ll try to answer James’s question out there. So what is the best approach for upgrading in the cloud? Can this be done in cloud integration environments or is it dedicated to the environment recommended to manage this while continuing with business as usual work? So, I mean, it depends on the size of your project, right? Certainly the cloud development integration environments are great to, you know, kind of put the version out there and do some basic testing, right? But if you’re really looking to get into more of the stress testing and have more QA there, if you have that and you’re on our commerce cloud, it can be a nice option if you have that affordability to add an additional staging, if you have a second dedicated staging to deploy that newer release so that you can have business as usual kind of testing and QA happening on one staging environment and then having your newer upgraded environment happening in a parallel staging environment, just so you can do some more performance-based testing and making sure everything is kind of working at least comparatively performance-wise, capability-wise. So a lot of our clients do do that, sort of have kind of an additional staging for these major upgrades.

I see a couple of people with hands raised, and I know that we’re not able to unmute everybody on the call. So I do encourage you to post any questions you have in the chat pod. We’ll give it a further couple of minutes.

Okay.

All right. I’ll try to see if we can get the answer to this one, Nicole. So Shubham is asking a question about if we update the Magento 2.3.7, 2.2.4.4, then we need to migrate the source and custom extension. I don’t know that I have a really clean answer to that one. I would say that evaluating what needs to be updated in the extension would be the first step. So we just have to be sure things are compatible and running your tests as you upgrade is the way to do that. But again, to reiterate what Shane said multiple times, if you need support in your upgrade with your commerce license, reaching out to support, helping get the right direction, custom extensions are custom. So we wouldn’t be able to know everything in that situation, but we certainly encourage you to do the mapping, do your upgrade planning, and evaluate what may need to change in that custom extension. And also if they’ve, well, yes, and evaluate needs to change in that custom extension. Yeah. Yeah, thanks Nicole. Also another question coming through, is the upgrade for commerce cloud or on premise? So an important one to cover actually, this is for both editions of the platform. It is, yes. All of our releases as we push them out are for both editions of the platform. Correct. Yeah, I just mentioned that before, the upgrade compatibility tool and the site-wide analysis tool both does support our cloud and on premise as well as our quality patch tool. So we do support either situation there. All right, Alan’s got a question. Is it worth it to go from 242 to 243 to avoid the pain of infrastructure upgrade before going to 244 later? I would definitely say as far as some of the, just making sure that I have to go look at the compatibility metrics, but if you can, if you do have the cycles to go from 242 to 243 P3, you’ll definitely have some later security fixes as well as some performance fixes, as well as making sure you have support of the underlying infrastructure versions. So that can reduce some of that pain as you go to 244, at least for some of the things like MariaDB, Redis, and some of the underlying components. Of course, then you’ll be facing primarily just the PHP upgrade from that point. So really from an underlying technology perspective, going from 74 to PHP 8.1. So we definitely see some benefit of doing that. Thank you, Shane. I don’t see any further questions coming through in the chat. And I know it’s approaching midnight for both of you. So once again, thank you. If there are further questions coming through, we will also just capture some of those and get back to you. And I would also encourage you to make reference of the resources that Shane shared in terms of best practices for upgrading. Also, I’d encourage you to reach out to your account manager if there’s anything else you need from Adobe as part of that upgrade planning. And we can provide the additional resources to you to help you plan that and provide some further documentation around best practice too. And with that, I think also, I mean, one last thing to cover. This is going to be a regular series, as I mentioned on our last webinar on a monthly basis. Do watch out for communications coming through for our next webinar in July. And I think with that, we’ll wrap here. Thank you all for joining today. We will be following up, as I mentioned in the chat, with the content shared today. And we’ll look to make the recording available as well. Shane and Nicole, once again, thank you so much for joining today. And thank you. Thank you so much, Ben. It was a pleasure being here. Thanks. Thanks, everyone, for the questions and taking the time. We really appreciate it.