How Adobe Commerce Is Adapting to the New World

The perception that Adobe Commerce and its technology architecture can’t keep up with today’s commerce platform requirements no longer holds true. Adobe Commerce architecture is evolving to meet modern digital commerce technology demands for best performance, low cost of ownership, and high return on investment.

The “Why” Behind Adobe Commerce Design

Adobe Commerce and other established enterprise commerce platforms have evolved from what many consider to be “monolithic” architectures. In these architectures, large numbers of features and capabilities are delivered through a singular host and code base to maximize the platform offering and reduce hosting complexity.

On a traditional monolithic Adobe Commerce project, a single code base could assume the following responsibilities and execute from shared infrastructure:

• Experience rendering and templating: Building HTML from the business rules, data, and experience definitions. Personalized experiences like cart and checkout pages required significant server resources.

• Core shopping cart behaviors: This includes key commerce functions such as inventory management, pricing, promotions, payments, shipment quoting, and more.

• Integration customizations: Custom fulfillment integration code, like order transmission to an ERP, shipping updates, and inventory synchronization.

• Functional customizations: These include setting custom fees, configurators, and subscriptions.

• Marketplace and third-party behaviors: Third-party capabilities and ISVs were deployed as code that ran on the core commerce servers.

• Data enrichment: Any enrichment in commerce data (like third-party dynamic pricing and inventory management overlays) also happened through the commerce services.

• Search and discovery: Includes catalog and product search and retrieval, as well as indexing.

This architecture originated in the early stages of cloud infrastructure and management maturity. Third parties and cloud native tools for management were new, and cloud providers continued to change the model for managing cloud infrastructure from images to infrastructure-as-code. This was a niche and costly skillset, and the rapidly evolving landscape required frequent refactoring of cloud management code.

Additionally, several services people rely on cloud providers to manage today — data center redundant database services, queues, data caching, page caching — weren’t available. With these factors in play, the code was built to run on a small number of dedicated physical servers that could be scaled over time, resulting in the monolithic nature of early commerce platforms.

Challenges Created by Monolithic Technology Architecture

As cloud technology advanced, some challenges emerged in managing traditional monolithic commerce platforms.

Upgrade complexity was among the most noticeable hurdles. Custom code, theme/branded experience, and marketplace code were deeply coupled to the core code, making it dependent on artifacts that could change over the product’s lifecycle. When the core code changed, the application required full regression testing (often revealing complications). In almost all cases, third-party providers required module upgrades — often 20 or more upgrades and regression tests — to receive support, leading to increased service fees for upgrades.

Other negative patterns included the following:

Scalability: Running integration code, core customizations, and third-party code on the same infrastructure negatively impacted performance. An intermittent data synchronization job could further slowdown order placement and clearing output caches significantly reduced store performance arbitrarily. Scalability challenges were especially apparent during high-traffic sales events and seasons, such as Black Friday through the retail holiday season.

Accountability: To ensure a consistently optimal user experience, it’s vital that teams can quickly pinpoint the cause of a performance lag or defect so that it can be fixed quickly. On more complex implementations, disagreements as to whether a defect was a core/product issue, or a workmanship issue required substantial time and effort to reveal the root cause.

Major version upgrades: Making significant improvements (i.e., major version upgrades) required a replatform-like effort. The lift required in this type of project often prompting merchants to re-evaluate their technology decision and explore alternatives.

Innovations in Modern Commerce Platforms

Seeing the challenges created by monolithic architectures, newer commerce platforms reexamined traditional product and platform responsibilities and introduced new ways of providing commerce capabilities.

No forced upgrade service dependency: Modern SaaS platforms decoupled their display and customization layers from the backend commerce engine, meaning that critical security and performance improvements can be released without involving custom development or UX teams. Provided that commerce engine APIs are unchanged, no forced upgrade work is required, enabling SaaS platforms to release updates without merchant involvement.

Scalability: SaaS platforms can better manage scale because external and/or custom code doesn’t form part of the solution, allowing platforms to offer scalability and performance service level agreements (SLAs) without blurring the lines. Additionally, all major SaaS platforms have re-architected to deliver critical capabilities through a microservice architecture permitting them to scale according to demand.

Composability: Decoupling the frontends empowers authors to build better experiences from a variety of experience components. For example, authors can build experiences by incorporating related components (e.g., build a loyalty page incorporating loyalty status component, previous products purchased component, and loyalty promotions component).

Event-driven architecture: All major, modern SaaS platforms leverage some form of webhook to allow customizations to react in real time to commerce actions and activities.

Clear accountability and SLAs: Platforms and merchants can clearly assess whether the platform is meeting its SLA without the murkiness introduced by co-located custom code.

Adobe Commerce's Modern Architecture Transformation

Adobe Commerce has made tremendous strides toward modernizing the enterprise architecture and changing the platform’s perception as monolithic. Historically, rendering, authoring, customization, integration have been the responsibility of the shopping cart platform and infrastructure, but that has all changed.

The most dramatic effects of the modern architecture include the following:

Industry-leading Core Web Vitals performance scores: Adobe delivers a true enterprise-scale and performance profile through minimalistic vanilla JavaScript implementation of critical commerce components (e.g., PDP, Cart, Checkout), Edge Delivery Services, and an emerging catalog microservices layer.

Powerful API Mesh: The API Mesh enables tackling real-world challenges, like stitching together datasets to serve experience, enabling a critical aspect of composability. The mesh is used to infuse real-time inventory or customer negotiated pricing into storefront experiences but can also incorporate third-party user review data or loyalty information into the experience.

Event-driven architecture: Merchants can build powerful integrations using the Adobe IO events, capabilities, and integration starter kits, quickly baking in observability and journalling capabilities.

Micro-frontends: Admin and customer services customizations would be delivered through the App Builder micro-frontends to enable customer service enhancements and customization.

Complete API: The Adobe Commerce API is a fully featured GraphQL API, enabling full headless implementation. This checks the API-first box for Adobe Commerce and sets it apart from other ubiquitous SaaS platforms.

Modern, enterprise-level Adobe Commerce implementations look very different from the past. Now, Adobe Commerce checks a range of architectural boxes while also significantly reducing cost of ownership and plugging into one of the most mature and complete martech stacks on the market. Reach out to Rightpoint to learn more about Adobe Commerce’s modern capabilities and how it can effectively serve your customers.