Strategies to optimize your Commerce site performance

Transcript

Next up, we have Catherine with strategies to optimize your commerce side performance. Take it away, Catherine. Welcome everyone to this developers live session where I’ll guide you through some strategies to optimize your commerce side performance. So first, let me introduce myself. I’m Catherine Tchelor. I work as a senior customer technical advisor for Adobe Commerce APAC. I’m in the same team as Aaron that you just saw. And I joined Adobe with a 10-year development experience in Adobe Commerce slash Magento. So the agenda of this presentation will be in three parts. First, we’ll cover common challenges faced by our customers. Then we’ll discuss the benefits of our cloud offering to overcome those challenges. And then we’ll discuss some best practices that will allow you to get even more performance out of Adobe Commerce on cloud. As more transactions are happening online, having creative and customized content is not enough to provide exceptional digital experiences. It is also important to provide scalable and performant e-commerce sites. There are so many incidents where companies risk losing customers and revenue due to slow site performance and downtime. You may yourselves have experienced or heard of events such as earlier this year when Twitter was not working or running extremely slowly in Australia and Australians were expressing this frustration with Elon Musk. There was also a global Instagram outage in May 2023 that affected thousands of users and businesses. And another example that may be more familiar to you is when you have scalability issues as you try to purchase concert tickets and you waste hours on the site waiting for your tickets to be available or waiting in queue to get your tickets. So all those site performance issues and lack of scalability for high traffic can lead to loss of potential sales, which is why scalability and performance are extremely important for not only business continuity but also growth. When asking our customers what challenges their teams are facing with their e-commerce business, there are three major issues that we want to address with you today. The first one is complex maintenance. With on-prem or homegrown systems, you oftentimes have costs rise due to management, maintenance and lack of resources. As a result, 81% of digital commerce applications will be on public cloud by 2026. Another challenge is when your customer needs to expand globally but is facing complexities that slow the time to market. And finally, a third barrier is old legacy technology that isn’t able to scale and support the business needs. Indeed, more than a third of business leaders cite legacy applications as a top barrier to digital transformation. So what can we do to overcome those challenges with Adobe Commerce on Cloud? So Adobe Commerce on Cloud offers a unified multi-brand e-commerce platform that lets you manage all content, products and digital experiences in one place, whether you own more than one brand, whether you sell in several countries or manage several business models. With Adobe Commerce on Cloud, you can set various pricing structures, show different products to different audiences or customize checkout and fulfillment options. Whether your audience is B2B, B2C, D2C or a combination, the Adobe Commerce multi-brand solution lets you manage them all without switching platforms, without hiring additional staff or bouncing between partners. So in terms of the benefits, for scale that we mentioned before and flexibility, we have a globally scalable platform. We support multi-site language and currency, and we can handle large volumes of traffic and transactions. Originally speaking specifically of the cloud model, its flexibility comes from the ability for organizations to both increase and reduce their amount of technology consumption based upon ever-changing needs. However, today, the main argument of hosting on the cloud is the possibility to get bigger with little to no effort, thanks to its scaling capabilities. I will pause here and talk about scalability. What do we mean by scalability? Scalability measures how well a piece of software handles change in expected workload behavior. For example, you have more traffic on Friday evenings because that’s when the marketing team sends the weekly campaign. Or in unexpected scenarios, there’s a viral news story that brings a lot of people to your site and you didn’t expect it. How do we measure scalability? We measure it in service availability and in page load times and responsiveness. Now moving on to the second benefit of Adobe Commerce on Cloud. We have enterprise-grade performance and reliability. We have high infrastructure SLAs of 99.99%. You can choose to be hosted on AWS or Azure that are popular solutions today for cloud infrastructure. Last but not least, with Adobe Commerce on Cloud comes Fastly. Fastly is a content delivery network or CDN. It will be included with your staging and production environments. The CDNs reduce overall data transfer amounts between the CDN cache servers that are located globally usually and the clients. Both the latency and the required bandwidth are reduced when the overall amount of data transferred goes down. The result is faster page load times and lower bandwidth costs. With Fastly also comes the full page cache feature for better performance and image optimization. Finally, we also offer you with Adobe Commerce on Cloud comprehensive monitoring with New Relic that you just saw a moment ago with Aaron among other sessions and the site-wide analysis tool. I’ll cover more of those monitoring tools in the next slides. The last biggest benefit of Adobe Commerce on Cloud is its robust extensibility and services. We have now what we call our modern stack with App Builder and API Mesh. You probably have heard of those already today and will hear more about them and I’ll discuss them more with you in the next slides as well. We also have our composable SaaS services. They provide an additional API surface that makes catalog data retrieval faster. Because they’re cloud-based services, they also are incredibly reliable and always up to date. Faster retrieval of data and more reliability means a better customer experience and that means better conversion rates. I want to pose a little on this slide just to show you our benchmark results for Adobe Commerce on Cloud when not customized in terms of scalability and just to mention that we are very confident in our enterprise scale performance numbers. Now, on to more specificities on what I presented so far. Commerce is a globally scalable platform to help extend to new markets as we’ve discussed and that works whether you’re B2B or B2C. We have a flexible multi-site architecture to create authentic localized experiences for each market you sell from a single admin. This is what we mean by less time to market. Basically, you may have launched a first site in Australia and maybe tomorrow you want to launch a new site in India. You do not need a new license. You do not need really pretty much anything else. You have your cloud license. You just can create a new website or store, store view as well and then you’re ready to launch in India. We can support as well hundreds of B2B shared catalogs and customer groups which allows you to apply custom pricing for different companies and discounts for each customer group and obviously we support local languages, currencies, different payment methods and tax policies to fit each market. This is out of the box. Now I want to move to some best practices to make the most of commerce on cloud and the first around scale and flexibility, the first thing I want to mention is the potential of leveraging the global reference architecture. I mentioned the scenario in which you start having multiple websites that share a number of features. Potentially, you launch your site in Australia and you want to launch in India now. However, imagining that you have distinct business rules for each market or perhaps different market requirements, a good idea is then to switch to a GRA methodology. You then get one cloud project per site or region. Why this is interesting? For example, you have two websites each using separate inventory tracking methodology, one via API and the other one via scheduled CSV imports. This is a good scenario to switch to GRA. Another common example is sites that are managed by different teams in different regions of the globe and have different needs for features. I’m giving an example, you sell cameras in, I don’t know, in the US you have a model that has some features but it’s not yet available in APAC for example. So how do you manage that? How do you manage different features? And obviously it’s nice to have one admin for multiple sites, but when you start launching your site all over the globe, it can be a bit messy and risky as well, having multiple admin users able to basically mingle and maybe change stuff that is not on the website that they should be managing. There’s more benefits to the global reference architecture. How it works is that part of the code is shared across all websites thanks to a meta package and the unique code for each website is developed and deployed in isolation to avoid conflicts. Therefore, if a region is having an outage, the other websites can continue to receive traffic. Backend integrations only communicate with the websites it is intended for. For example, I have a payment method in Thailand, I don’t need to make that available to the US site. And it is also much easier to comply with local regulations when you have GRA. We know now that with the protection of data, some countries have very strict rules, so being able to separate your sites into different cloud projects can sometimes be a solution to that. Now, a second big asset of Adobe Commerce on Cloud when it comes to scale and flexibility is the scaled architecture. The scaled architecture allows you to scale the web and core tiers independently to achieve an optimal balance of performance. Historically, when you receive your Adobe Commerce on Cloud Pro architecture, it consists of three nodes, each containing a full tech stack. But now we also have a scalable architecture that provides a tiered architecture with a minimum of six nodes, three nodes for the core database and services like Open Search, and three nodes for the web server, PHP, FPM, NGINX, etc. This split tier architecture provides the capability to scale tiers independently to achieve an optimal balance of performance. Last but not least, we also offer and will be offering more of auto scaling at the moment when you’re on the scale architecture. So auto scaling automatically adds or removes resources to the cloud infrastructure to maintain optimal performance and reasonable costs. So I want to mention something here. When you know an upcoming surge in traffic, the best practice is still to advise our support team at least 48 hours in advance, if you’re aware, even if you have this scale architecture with auto scaling. However, you can enable auto scaling if you’re on the scale architecture at the moment by raising a support ticket. Currently, the auto scaling feature only scales horizontally by adding or removing web server nodes and an auto scaling event occurs when CPU usage and traffic reach a predefined threshold. From the end of this year beginning of next year, auto scaling will be available for the service nodes as well, which is a big step. And the customers who are on a standard architecture will also be able to benefit from auto scaling. So stay tuned for that. Now our top tips when it comes to performance and reliability. First, remember that we have a continuous delivery of the cloud services that lets developers automate testing beyond just unit tests so they can verify application updates across multiple dimensions before deploying to customers. These tests may include UI testing, load testing, integration testing, API reliability testing, etc. We also provide you with comprehensive monitoring tools. So we mentioned those tools before. You may have seen them in other sessions today as well. But one tool that we are very proud of is the SiteWide analysis tool. It is a proactive service tool and a central repository that includes detailed system insights and recommendations to ensure the security and operability of your Adobe commerce installation. 24 seven, you can open the SiteWide analysis tool and you get real time performance monitoring reports and advice to identify potential issues and have better visibility into your site health, the safety and the application configuration. So we strongly recommend that you get in the habit of checking the SiteWide analysis tool. We keep improving this tool and we really have it in mind that this is the first tool you need to go to when you experience issues, especially around performance or security. So we strongly advise you to again, check this tool regularly and feel free to reach out to your account manager if you need a walkthrough of this tool and we’ll be happy to provide this to you. We have seen in previous sessions New Relic, obviously most developers will be familiar with this tool, but this is another tool that we strongly recommend you leverage for your cloud application. It contains all the logs, not only of your application, but also other services like Fastly. So you can go there and check your application performance. You can check how your infrastructure is performing. And my team also usually provides cloud projects with what we call a one view dashboard. This dashboard is usually a first place you can go to when you want to monitor the site health and performance. We give you in this dashboard information on your infrastructure, application, but also Fastly cache your CDN usage, etc. So this is a good source of information. Again, when you need to troubleshoot an issue, it’s a good place to go fast. A third tip to leverage Adobe Commerce on Cloud, but that’s more of an upcoming tip. So for the newer or future Adobe Commerce on Cloud adopters, just know that we will be offering soon blue-green deployments. So what are blue-green deployments? They allow for zero downtime and safe rollbacks, basically. So you can, with blue-green deployments, operate two separate but identical environments in parallel. So you can gain visibility into old and new environments for testing purposes and simple rollouts. The other ability that it gives you is to switch from one Adobe Commerce deployment to another. So you can avoid downtime or site unavailability when you deploy, which is something we know is a bit frustrating and will make your customers more happy. Another benefit is that you can always roll back to the blue or first environment, previous environment instantly if an issue occurs with a new deployment. So this is very good for backup and disaster recovery. And we feel like this will add a lot of benefits to again, adopting Adobe Commerce on the Cloud. Now onto our robust extensibility and services. So we’ve talked about extensively today our modern stack, App Builder and API Mesh. So to give you more details for those who may not have caught up the previous sessions or the future sessions, what are they? So App Builder is based on Adobe IO, which is an event-driven framework to build near real-time applications and integrations. It will simplify platform upgrades and maintenance. But also the biggest asset of App Builder is that it allows you to let developers who do not have commerce experience extend your application. And we feel like this is something big because we have heard you, we know that most developers have a long learning curve when it comes to Adobe Commerce on Cloud because it is a rich system. So with App Builder, we’re hoping that we will bridge this gap. Any front-end developer will receive information that is API-based to be able to, for example, create a new front-end. Or even a back-end developer who does not have commerce experience can create features or even connectors thanks to App Builder without previous knowledge of Adobe Commerce, which is, we feel like a great step. Adding to that, we have API Mesh. It is a technology that will allow you to combine multiple API sources into one single GraphQL endpoint for better flexibility and maintenance when you extend commerce. That means if I take back this example of a front-end developer who has to create a new storefront, that you don’t need to call them every time you want to integrate a third-party system. You don’t have to call and say, look, I’m adding this payment method. This is the API documentation. This is the API endpoints. No, it will all be combined in the Mesh. So they only can access the Mesh and they will see new resources, new endpoints available, new queries that they can run directly from there. So this is, again, a lot of safe time and we hope that it will make it much better for flexibility and maintenance when extending commerce. Another big step that we talk about a lot and is changing the future of commerce on cloud is our composable SaaS services. So you can add advanced services as needed with our SaaS modules. I mentioned that most of them are also included in your cloud license, so you do not need to pay extra for those. So you can roll out new capabilities rapidly with those services. They work natively with the Commerce Foundation. I will show you in the next slide how we can leverage that. But basically, what is the benefit of using those? Well, they’re always up to date, which makes it easy to adopt new features and they’re hosted separately on the cloud themselves. So you do not need to think about, OK, how to upgrade it, update it. It’s already updated for you. You also get all the benefits of microservices without the complexity and each service, because it’s hosted separately, scales automatically to meet planned and unexpected demands. Finally, you can reduce the cost of ownership by minimizing integrations and customization. Those services are maintained by our teams, so that’s less work for you. And as I said, I will give you an example of a Commerce Foundation with the SaaS services integrated and what it brings to the commerce system overall when you use it on the cloud. And last but not least, robust accessibility and services also comes with security. You need to have faith in your platform, and that’s what we try and deliver with Adobe Commerce on cloud. So Adobe Commerce is PCI compliant on the cloud before you customize it, but just know that. So the core is PCI compliant. If you have a customer who wants to comply with this, you know you don’t have to worry about the core of Adobe Commerce. We also provide you with numerous security tools. One of them is the Security Scan tool that you can now also merge with the Site-wide analysis tool that I mentioned before. The Security Scan tool will give you insights into the real-time security status of your store and provides you suggestions based on best practices to help resolve issues. You can also schedule security scans during weekly, daily, or on demand, and there’s a lot of security tests basically as part of this security scan tool. The Site-wide analysis tool, I will never be tired of mentioning it, will also give you a lot of security recommendations, so we strongly recommend you check that regularly as I mentioned before. Something that is not highlighted in the slide, but we also provide you with Fastly with Commerce on cloud, and Fastly includes a WAF or web application firewall, which helps you protect your site by filtering and monitoring HTTP traffic between the web application and the internet. So typically, this will help protect your site from attacks such as cross-site forgery, cross-site scripting, file inclusion, and SQL injection, etc. Last but not least, as part of security, we had a robust backup and disaster recovery system. We take snapshots of your data and your code regularly, so when you have an outage or when you’re not sure what’s going wrong, we can easily recover the system from a previous state by leveraging those snapshots. Before moving on to the next slide, I feel like sharing our top five security best practices. We feel like they can be useful for all of you who are watching today. You may think, okay, let me write those down and I’m going to check for all the sites that we have on Commerce on cloud, whether we’ve enabled those or not. So the first one is enable two-factor authentication for your admin panel and all SSH connections. Second, set up and use a non-default admin URL. Third, keep your code up to date by installing all patch releases from Adobe. We often tell you that. The SWAT will tell you that as well. When you’re not sure, check the site-wide analysis tool. Four, implement log config and log env environment variables. And five, set up and run the Commerce security scan tool. Very important, as we said before. Right. Now, a bit more fun. Let’s move on from security to our SaaS services and seeing what they bring to the table in terms of performance. So this is an example of an implementation leveraging and combining our latest technologies. Here we don’t have necessarily a builder and API mesh included, but it’s just to show you if you were to include all those SaaS services, what would be the benefit? So as I said, independent SaaS services are always up to date. They scale independently from the core foundation. So each of them scales independently and they help improve performance. So the first two that you have here are live search and product recommendations. For those who don’t know, they enhance the search of your site and the product recommendations that’s as per its name. But they’re also based on Adobe Sensei, which is an API driven engine that we have here at Adobe. So they will also monitor your customer behavior and try to serve the best recommendations for them based on the way that they behave on your site. So that’s also very impressive. We also have as a SaaS service, the catalog service. So this one, maybe fewer people know about it, but it allows you to offload the indexing to this cloud catalog service, which is tremendous, like increases in performance when it comes to the commerce foundation. And it comes also with the price indexer add on, which a lot of our customers are starting to use and love because we know that price indexing is a big performance, maybe bottleneck when it comes to normal commerce foundations, especially for those of you who have a lot of SKUs on your side. So we’ve heard you and we’ve implemented that in price indexer to separate that. Now we have payments and sales channels. Those are not fully available in APAC yet, but just so you know, they’re coming soon and they will be additional merchant services to help you with payments and channel management and scalable services for the storefront like catalog management. So as we can see, we have a robust set out of the box commerce capabilities that are cloud native, included with your cloud license, as mentioned before, and adopting those, as you see, will lead to a lot of performance improvements. Ten times faster product data retrieval, five times faster page load times and 90 percent faster price updates with the price indexer add on to catalog services, as I discussed before. So I know there was a lot of information in this presentation, so I will give you a moment to review those key takeaways and please reach out to your commercial manager if you wish to know more on any of those features that I highlighted. We can organize a session with someone from my team and we’ll be happy to advise you on performance and security best practices and organize enablement sessions. Among others, we can do a New Relic walkthrough, a site-wide analysis tool walkthrough or even a health review of your site when you’re hosted on the cloud. So feel free to also leverage those other benefits, hidden benefits of the cloud with us and, as I said, just reach out to your account manager for this. We have two QR codes that we invite you to scan. The first one is our customer success stories on Experience Cloud and the other one is our amazing documentation on Experience League. So it contains a plethora of information on how to configure your site on Adobe Commerce on Cloud and we’ll give you more information also on performance best practices. I just want to give a special mention to Matt Johnson and Alissa Espiritu, who inspired this presentation because they originally created an Adobe Summit session. If you wish to review this session, there is a QR code here again. And this is it for me. Thank you for joining this session on optimizing your site performance and enjoy the next sessions of Developer’s Life.