Magento comes in two editions that share a codebase and differ enormously in how they are paid for. Adobe Commerce, and its Cloud variant, is licensed on a store's revenue; Magento Open Source is free and runs wherever you put it. For a store that has grown out of a single server, the question is whether the open-source edition can be made as resilient as the hosted one. This post follows an e-commerce manager answering that on MassiveGRID PaaS, which is built on Virtuozzo Application Platform, formerly Jelastic.
The store is a home-and-garden retailer we will call Fennel & Fern, doing about 30,000 orders a month on Magento Open Source on one large server that falls over on promotion days. The option on the table is the Auto-Scalable Magento Cluster package: a load balancer with Varnish, auto-scaling PHP application servers, a replicated MariaDB cluster, Redis for sessions and cache, a search engine and shared media storage, installed as one environment.
How the two options are priced
Adobe Commerce Cloud is a licence plus hosting, and the licence is tiered on annual gross merchandise value, so it rises as the store sells more regardless of whether costs rose. It includes B2B features, page builder, customer segmentation and Adobe's managed hosting with staging environments. Magento Open Source has no licence fee. The cluster package on the PaaS is billed on cloudlet-hours (128 MiB of RAM plus 400 MHz of CPU per cloudlet) for what the containers actually use, so cost rises with traffic and falls with it, and has no relationship to revenue.
For Fennel & Fern the revenue tier put Adobe Commerce's licence alone into a range that exceeded the store's entire current hosting bill many times over. That is not a criticism of the product; the features are real. It is a statement about which cost curve a mid-sized retailer wants to be on.
What the open-source cluster gives you, technically
The manager's fear was that open source meant a single server. The cluster package answers that with a topology that mirrors what an enterprise Magento host builds by hand.
- Load balancer with Varnish full-page cache in front, with NGINX terminating HTTPS. Cached category and product pages are served without touching PHP, which is where most traffic on a promotion day goes.
- Scalable PHP application servers running the same Magento code, with horizontal auto-scaling triggers pre-configured so nodes are added under load and removed afterwards. New nodes join the balancer automatically.
- Replicated MariaDB cluster, so a database node can fail without losing orders, with the platform's ProxySQL entry point routing connections.
- Redis for sessions and for Magento's cache, which is what lets several PHP nodes share carts and logins.
- Search engine (Elasticsearch or OpenSearch) for catalogue search and layered navigation, which Magento 2.4 requires.
- Shared storage for media, so an image uploaded through the admin appears on every node.
Every container runs on a separate physical host by anti-affinity, the platform migrates a container off a failing host live, and MassiveGRID carries a 100% uptime SLA. The high availability the manager wanted from the hosted edition is in the package.
Cost per order, side by side
| Item | Adobe Commerce Cloud | Open Source cluster on PaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Licence | Annual, tiered on gross merchandise value | None (Open Software License) |
| Hosting | Included, fixed tier | Per cloudlet-hour on actual use, published rate $0.003372 |
| Behaviour on promotion day | Fixed capacity per tier; upsizing is a contract change | PHP layer scales out automatically, scales back the next morning |
| Staging | Included environments | Clone the environment; pay for the hours it runs |
| B2B, page builder, segmentation | Included | Third-party or open-source extensions, some paid |
| Data location | Adobe's cloud regions | New York, London, Frankfurt or Singapore, your choice |
| Exit | Migration project | Environment export; standard Magento code and MariaDB dump |
Fennel & Fern's cluster, sized for its normal weekday traffic with headroom to scale, averages a few hundred cloudlets an hour across the month: two PHP nodes most of the time, five or six on promotion days, plus the database, cache, search and storage nodes. That lands in the high hundreds of dollars a month before discounts, and the manager can see it per node in the dashboard's billing history. Divided by 30,000 orders it is cents per order, and it falls as a share of revenue when sales grow.
What the manager has to buy or build instead
The honest column in the table is the features row. Adobe Commerce includes capabilities that Open Source does not: the B2B suite, the visual page builder, customer segmentation and Adobe's own support. Fennel & Fern uses none of the B2B features and had already replaced the page builder with a theme. It does pay for two extensions and a Magento agency retainer, which it would under either option. The manager's conclusion was that the features it used were free, and the ones it paid for on Adobe's licence were ones it did not use.
The promotion-day test
Before deciding, the manager ran the platform's trial: installed the cluster package, imported the catalogue, and asked the agency to load-test a promotion. The PHP layer went from two nodes to five in about ten minutes as the triggers fired, Varnish absorbed most of the category browsing, and the checkout stayed responsive because sessions and carts lived in Redis, not on any one node. The next morning the layer was back to two. The manager's note to the finance director said: we pay for the sale on the day of the sale.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Magento Open Source still maintained?
Yes. Adobe releases Magento Open Source alongside Adobe Commerce on the same schedule, and the Mage-OS community distribution tracks it. Security patches are published for both editions.
Can I move a single-server Magento store into the cluster package?
Yes. Install the cluster, deploy your code to the PHP layer, import the database into the MariaDB cluster and copy media to the shared storage node, then run setup:upgrade and reindex. Rehearse the move on the trial environment, then repoint DNS. The Magento Standalone package is a good staging target for the code before the cluster.
Where does the search engine and Varnish configuration come from?
The package configures Magento to use the deployed search engine and sets Varnish as the full-page cache application with the generated VCL. You manage the settings afterwards in Magento's admin and the platform's config editor as on any installation.
Pay for the sale on the day of the sale
The Auto-Scalable Magento Cluster installs a Varnish load balancer, auto-scaling PHP servers, a replicated MariaDB cluster, Redis, search and shared storage in one click on MassiveGRID PaaS. Per cloudlet-hour, 100% uptime SLA. Free 14-day trial.
Magento Cluster on MassiveGRID PaaS