Magento Go: To the Cloud!

Posted in Magento by B00MER

magento_go

What is Magento Stratus? According to the FAQ:

Updated 4/14/2011: Magento Stratus is now Magento Go

A follow up from my questions below answered by Magento staff: Magento Go is a fully-managed service running on a private cloud we’ve built for security & performance. Therefore, we handle all the management. And since its not on Rackspace’s standard cloud, there are no management APIs to expose – only ones from the Magento Go Platform.

Project Stratus is Magento’s next-generation on-demand eCommerce platform. At its core, Stratus is an online version of our award-winning eCommerce platform. Everything you already know and love about the Magento platform is available with this hosted service. Stratus creates more choice for merchants to select the product and platform that best fits their needs. Stratus will empower merchants and developers to customize, modify, extend and integrate a hosted store as if it were their own code running on their own servers … an unprecedented capability in the market today.

It appears both Magento and Rackspace have teamed up to create Magento Stratus. From what I have gathered and speculation it is Magento running on Rackspace cloud services with some integration with the Rackspace cloud API.   This site is currently running on Rackspace’s cloud and I have used them in the past for a semi-large social network that served up lots of Videos and Photos.  Overall it has come a long way from being “Mosso” with lots of applications and others using it.

Some of the advantages to these that I see are:

  • One single Core that will be maintained by Magento themselves. No one else will be able to touch it.
  • Upgrades to the Core will be done by Magento or Rackspace to the single Core all stores will share.
  • Easier PCI Compliance, and maintenance to stay compliant.
  • Ability to increase server hardware capabilities on the fly to handle surges of traffic to stores via Rackspace’s cloud API.
  • Rackspace’s Support services.
  • Ability to push Media to CDN’s (Content Delivery Networks).
  • Cheap bandwidth/hardware.

One question that begs to be answered the most is; How extensible will the code be?

Will 3rd party modules have to be approved to run in the cloud first? Will I be able to extend any part of Magento as if I was hosting the source and database myself?  Will there be access to SSH and/or the DB if needed to make a change such as updating PEAR or issuing a SQL Query?  Will we have access to use Rackspace’s Cloud API in code if we wish?

I have put in my invite and have received requests back from Magento about it, however they are looking for actual Store owners to go onto the stratus cloud as “Beta” users. Being that I’m just an developer, I haven’t gotten a chance to play with it.  If anyone is looking, let me know and we can see what could be worked out.

More details and request an invite:
:arrow: http://www.magentocommerce.com/stratus

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10Jan2011

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What’s in a name other than a label attached to the things we’ve created and done for ubiquity... What is Molotov.bliss?

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This entry was posted on 01/10/2011 in Magento and tagged , , ,

12 Responses to Magento Go: To the Cloud! Add your comment

  1. Tom Robertshaw says:
    01/10/2011 at 8:49 am

    Hi, I think this is truly the hosted solution for customers that are looking for it almost out of the box. I imagine that it will be more in comparison to Shopify, for the portion of the eCommerce market that really don’t have the time or the money to spend on a custom Magento project. So, chances of getting access to the code via SSH is slim.nnInteresting problem with Magento modules. Not all work exactly the way we want straight out of the box and need a little bit of tweaking, so it will be interesting to see how this is handled.

  2. Nick Jones says:
    01/10/2011 at 9:00 am

    I don’t think Stratus is the solution for everyone. Not having access to the code is clearly going to be an issue for people such as you and I. I think this is aimed at the people that “just want to sell online”, and don’t necessarily care about the flexibility or the copious Magento modules available on Magento Connect.nnPutting a load of people on the system does, as you rightly say, reduce the cost of the hardware the stores are running on which means that we can get the advantages of a MySQL cluster and memcached servers. It’s an interesting tactic and it will be interesting to see how much it affects our business.

  3. Anonymous says:
    01/10/2011 at 7:39 pm

    Thanks for the comment Tom. Maybe my heads in the clouds with some of the possibilities Stratus could entail if it was done right? Since Magento has no “coding standards” I’m not sure how they could “approve” modules to be used in Stratus. It may be just clear cut case of, out of box CE on Rackspace Cloud and call it day. Customizations requests get ported over to Pro and EE editions for more bank roll for Magento. ;) BTW, your pre-launch checklist is awesome.

  4. Tom Robertshaw says:
    01/10/2011 at 8:55 pm

    No problem. That’s my guess to what it’ll be like first release. Any first release is going to be relatively conservative when it comes to features. Perhaps extendability will be a question they come to a little down the line. We’ll just have to wait and see!nnI’m sure many developers would happily pay for their modules to be marked as “approved” on Magento connect after a code read through – not sure if we want to go down the complete Apple App Store kind of market though! That breeds frustration.nnThere is Magento Developer Certification being announced soon, so I do think we’re heading in that direction.nnThanks dude :)

  5. Anonymous says:
    01/10/2011 at 11:12 pm

    Nick, I would agree – It seems like a ASP (Application service provider) type business model to compete with other Carts using a similar model. I don’t think it will effect us “third party” developers as much as it will really cut into those whom specialize in Magento hosting. Either way – if they can pull it off and keep it easily extensible without too much pain, it seems like a win, win situation. Hopefully they can pull it off. Thanks for the comments BTW.

  6. Anonymous says:
    01/12/2011 at 7:56 am

    Appears they are no longer taking betas, and confirmation customizations isn’t possible at this time…nn”Thank you for the updated. At this time we can not handle any customization and today is also the last day to be approved for this program. We have met our 100 client limit and will be offering stratus for purchase in the near future via our ecommerce site.”

  7. da m says:
    01/22/2011 at 5:40 pm

    We’ve seen Magento running poorly in both Media Temple and Rackspace cloud customers. The backend storage architecture of the cloud does not work well with Magento’s DB schema. To make it run would require a solution so expensive it wouldn’t be profitable.nnWhat about Varien support? Have you ever dealt with that company? If so there’s no way you’d put your hosting in their hands. That alone ensures third party hosting companies specializing in Magento will still have some business.nnHaving said all that, I’m sure it will catch the eye of all Magento owners who will try it out. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for customers to riot and if Varien will censor their forums to hide the disgruntled customers.

  8. Anonymous says:
    02/08/2011 at 11:31 pm

    Have you tried using any kinds of caching layers, like memcache or such to lessen the load? I would think the initial investment of a full page caching system like Tinybrick’s Lightspeed module would be worth it and running memcache along with eaccelerator on a 1-2GB RAM Cloud Server would suffice. I would agree, Magento’s DB EAV schema doesn’t work well with anything but a 24GB Ram Server and Quad Core CPU’s hehe. nnI’ve not dealt with support directly but I have heard how slow to respond they can be. Makes me wonder whos going to be handling the support Rackspace or Magento.nnThere’s been lots of talk at the Imagine Conference about it, course now its named Magento Go! and Not Stratus… Boo! I think of Go Daddy now, Stratus was much cooler IMHO.nnOfficial video they have released: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CyIJpEeoF0

  9. da m says:
    02/08/2011 at 11:58 pm

    We have done layers of caching including memcache. What we’ve found is that putting db, files, session, cache, etc. on SSD disks gives us our best bang for our buck. But SSD’s wouldn’t work for a shared backend on a cloud because of their small size and controllers aren’t built for large arrays of SSD’s. Memcache would be prohibitively expensive as well.nnWhat about no access to the code? That raises other issues especially issues with extensions. I supposed you’d end up limited to the extensions they approved. I can’t even imagine, as slow as Varien is, how long it would take to get an extension approved.nnI just doesn’t make sense to me. I mean the people I see running Magento are running it because they need customizations, they need to make it do things that other carts aren’t. When you take away access to the code in the cloud, well you take away that freedom. I mean really, why else would someone deal with Magento’s complexity unless they need flexibility. Otherwise you shouldn’t be running it because there are many other carts out there that will far less expensive to get up and running, maintain and train people to use in day to day operations.

  10. Therealmiliscent says:
    02/11/2011 at 6:05 pm

    Looks like Varien came back after comments started being posted on the Go video at youtube and disabled commenting.nnAnd so the censorship begins…

  11. Scrumkins says:
    03/02/2011 at 1:00 am

    Signed up for a Go! trial over 2 hours ago. Got my activation email and it doesn’t work. Looks like the even the setup process is buggy, not good…

  12. Anonymous says:
    03/02/2011 at 9:13 am

    Signed up right after I got the email and it seems it doesn’t work to well if you already have a magentocommerce.com login, had to dig around and reset some passwords to get access…

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