Magento on Cloud

Magento on Cloud

April 18, 2016

1-click AWS Deployment 1-click Azure Deployment 1-click Google Deployment


Overview

Magento is a podium built on open source technology which provides online merchants with supple shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools. Common Places uses the community-based Magento product for our ecommerce clients. Magento’s capability to scale permits shops with only a few products and simple needs to easily expand to tens of thousands of products and complex custom behavior without changing platforms. It offers a variety of plug-ins and themes which can easily improve a customer’s experience. There are a lot of aspects to the online store which need to be configured, and how well that is skillful is often dependent on business insight.

Magento opensource vs. Magento commerce

The difference between Magento Commerce and Magento Opensource is given below:

  • Magento Opensource: Previously known as Magento Community, Magento Opensource, the free version of Magento that can be downloaded, customized, and self-hosted.
  • Magento Commerce: Previously, Magento Commerce came in two versions, Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud. Those two versions have been unified, leaving us with Magento Commerce, a premium version of Magento Opensource that includes cloud-hosting as part of the subscription fee.

Magento Opensource is available for everyone to download free of charge. It’s an open source platform that is free to use and you’re able to extend and configure the platform as you please. Also, Opensource users have access to a vast range of extensions and themes and are supported by a growing community. 

Magento Architecture:

Magento Architecture

 

The Magento architecture comes with Models, Views and Controllers.

  • User Request − The user sends a request to a server in the form of request message where web browsers, search engines, etc. act like clients.
  • View − View represents the data in particular format. It is the user interface which is responsible for displaying the response for user request. It specifies an idea behind the presentation of the model’s data to the user. Views are used to reflect “how your data should look like”.
  • Controller − The controller is responsible for responding to user input and perform interactions on the data model objects. It uses models to process the data and send responses back to the view.
  • Model − The model is responsible for managing the data of the application. It contains logic of the data and represents basic data object in the framework. It responds to request from the view and to the instructions from the controller to update itself.
  • Database − Database contains the information which is requested from the user. When the user requests data, view sends requests to the controller, the controller requests from the model and the model fetches the required information from the database and responds to the user.
  • WSDL − WSDL stands for Web Services Description Language. It is used for describing web services and how to access them.

Magento Products

Products are the items or things that are sold in Magento. Product can be anything that is capable of satisfying the customer’s needs. This includes both physical products and services.

Product Types

Magento provides 6 different types of products. Appropriate selection of product type is essential for accessing the appropriate set of features required to sell the product. Following are the product types available in Magento.

  • Simple Products
  • Grouped Products
  • Configurable Products
  • Virtual Products
  • Bundled Products
  • Downloadable Products

Simple Products

These are general product type, which are the most used products. In this section, there are no options for selecting size or color of the product.

Example − Coffee cup, DVD’s, Camera lens, etc.

Grouped Products

This is a group of simple products. In this type, you cannot specify a specific price for a product; you can just specify the discount.

Example − Cell phone + Memory card + Ear phone

Configurable Products

In this type, customer can select products according to their color and size before purchasing.

Example − Cell phones obtained in different colors and sizes.

Virtual Products

Virtual products are those which do not have physical counterpart, i.e. these are used for virtual items. These products cannot be shipped or stocked.

Example − Online training course

Bundled Products

Bundled products are those products which cannot be sold separately and doesn’t give any choice to the end user.

Example − Consider you want to buy a cell phone which includes earphone, memory card, battery, charging cable, etc. These are together called bundled products. These products cannot be sold individually but can be sold within the bundle product.

Downloadable Products

Products which are available for download are known as downloadable products.

Example − MP3 file, ebook, documents, etc.

Product Attributes

Attribute describes the property of the product. Product attributes helps to set product properties such as color, size width, height, etc. and makes the product unique. You can add as many attributes to your product as required.

The following steps describe, how to set up the attributes for products in Magento −

Step 1 − Login to your Magento Admin Panel.

Step 2 − Go to Catalog and select Attributes from the dropdown menu and click on the Manage Attributes option.

Magento Setup

Step 3 − Under Manage Attributes section, you will find different attributes used in the system. For adding new attribute, click on Add New Attribute seen on the top right corner of the screen.

Magento Setup

Step 4 − Now you need to set the attribute properties for your product. After setting up all the required attribute properties, click on Save Attribute button to store the product information

Magento Setup

Magento – Installation

System Requirements for Magento

  • Database − MySQL 5.1 +
  • Web Server −
    • Apache 2.x
    • Nginx 1.7.x
  • Operating System − Cross-platform
  • Browser Support − IE (Internet Explorer 7), Firefox, Google chrome
  • SSL (Secure Socket Layer) − A valid security certificate is required for HTTPS
  • PHP Compatibility − PHP 5.4+

Download Magento

Step 1 − Open the link https://www.magentocommerce.com/products/downloads/magento/, you will get to see the following screen −

Magento Installation

Step 2 − Click on the dropdown menu, the archive file is available in .zip, .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 for downloading.

Step 3 − Extract the Magento web files from the archive on your computer and upload it into your web server or localhost.

Step 4 − Magento requires MySQL database. So create a new empty database and user/password (for e.g. user as “root” and password as “root” or else you can set as per your convenience) for Magento.

Step 5 − Open your browser and navigate to your Magento file path (for e.g. http://localhost/magento) to start your Magento installation. Then you will get a screen of the Magento installer as shown in the following screenshot.

Magento Installer

Step 6 − Click on Continue button and you will get Validation for Magento Downloader screen as shown in the following screen

Magento Installer

Here, enter the database details, if you want to check for InnoDB support for Magento. Otherwise, click on Continue button to proceed to the next step.

Step 7 − Next, you will get Magento Connect Manager Deployment screen.

Magento Installer

It gives protocol name (HTTP or FTP), stability version such as stable, beta, alpha and deployment type. Select proper options and click on the Continue button. It will start the downloading process for Magento.

Step 8 − Magento’s Installation Wizard screen pops up. Check the I agree to the above terms and conditions checkbox and click on the Continue button.

Magento Installer

Step 9 − Next you will get the Localization screen for selecting the Locale, Time Zone and Currency as shown in the following screen.

Magento Installer

Select proper locale name, time zone and currency and click on the Continue button.

Step 10 − The next screen that pops up is the Configuration screen

Magento Installer

Fill the database information such as Database Type, Host, Database Name, User Name and User Password. If you do not want to validate the Base URL, then tick the Skip Base URL validation before Next Step checkbox and click on the Continue button.

In case the http://localhost/magento doesn’t work, use this as base url instead- http://127.0.0.1/magento

This step will take some time as Magento will be creating the Database Tables.

Step 11 − Now, go to the Create Admin Account screen.

Magento Installer

Here enter your personal information such as First Name, Last Name and Email and the Login Information such as Username, Password and Confirm Password for admin to use in backend. Need not worry about Encryption Key field as Magento will generate a key on the next page. After filling all information, click on the Continue button.

Step 12 − Copy the encryption key, which will be used to encrypt passwords, credit cards and other confidential information. Then you can select Frontend or Backend of new Magento website.

Step 13 − After successful installation of Magento, click on the Go to Backend button to login to admin panel.

Magento Installer

Step 14 − After logging in, you will get the Dashboard of Admin panel as shown in the following screen.

Magento Installer

 Disadvantages of Magento as an eCommerce platform:

1. Ongoing costs Magento regularly rolls out patches and security updates which needs to be manually installed. And believe me, the manual installation process is not as straightforward as you like it to be. You’re better off getting support to help you manage and install the updates, but this would come at a cost. You would need to hire Magento specialists or refer to official Magento support, which does not come cheap.

2. Needy technology If you’re using Magento Commerce edition, you’ll find that it’s based on an old approach of “download and customize”. Not only does that take time, but it also takes technical knowledge .This approach from Magento also saps your attention and energy away from the activities that will help you scale your business. Instead, you will be forced to worry about managing the technology and running updates as and when required.

3. The support sinkhole Magento has 1,300 open and ongoing support tickets. So if you run into issues, you may be waiting in line for fairly some time before you find a solution. If you want to bypass official Magento support your ongoing support costs will rise even further, as sovereign Magento support specialists charge substantial fees.

4.Magento is just an eCommerce solution Magento is a planetary eCommerce platform, but that’s pretty much all it is. But in today’s eCommerce climate, to even stand a slim chance against the eCommerce goliaths like Amazon, you need so much more than just an eCommerce platform. The modern consumer isn’t satisfied with just a product page and some on-site reviews. They want content in abundance before they even consider a purchase. They want walkthroughs, unboxing videos, documentation, third-party reviews, and more.

5. Updates and migrations  Running Magento undergo an endless cycle of updates and running these maintenance procedures is not a forthright task. Also, you would ultimately have to migrate to the newest version of Magento, whenever they decide to roll that out. For example, currently, Magento 1 users are experiencing the pain of having to migrate to Magento 2.Magento 1 users have to either migrate to Magento 2 or replatform completely, as it was announced that Magento would not be providing support for Magento 1 after June 2022As you can imagine, the migration process isn’t easy or inexpensive. Many developers who have migrated to Magento 2 have commented on the difficulty of the move, as many Magento 1 themes and extensions are incompatible with Magento 2.

 6. It’s open source As an open source platform, Magento gives users the ability to customize the code in any way they like. That may sound great at first, but when you consider issue #5 mentioned previously, having a highly-customized, bespoke back-end will make your life even more difficult when it comes to inevitably migration or replatforming. Also if you stray too far away from commonly used theme and extensions that aren’t peer-reviewed or tested for usability, you’ll risk breaking your entire eCommerce environment. If you opt for a closed source enterprise eCommerce solution, you can still build a custom site with the help of the software vendor or an agency, but it will be done within the limits of the software, avoiding breakage and future headaches. Plus, closed source platforms have a much healthier track record when it comes to security.

7. Magento isn’t built for the IoT era Magento Commerce has APIs to help deliver content to a wide range of channels, but as previously mentioned, Magento is just an eCommerce solution — it was never meant to manage a brand’s omnichannel strategy across all touchpoints. So, at best, you’ll get an inconsistent experience because you’ll have to draft in additional technology to plug the gaps left by Magento. Hardly ideal when brands like Amazon are providing seamlessly enjoyable shopping experiences.

Magento on cloud is an open source E-commerce software, created by Varien Inc., which is useful for online business. It has a flexible modular architecture and is scalable with many control options that is helpful for users. Magento uses E-commerce platform which offers organizations ultimate E-commerce solutions and extensive support network.

“Cognosys Provides Hardened images of Magento on the cloud ( AWS marketplace, Azure and Google Cloud Platform).  Cognosys Provides Hardened images of Magento on the cloud ( AWS marketplace, Azure and Google Cloud Platform).”

Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by an extensive support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.”
Magento is available under the Open Software License version 3.0

Magento is owned by Magento(https://magento.com/) and they own all related trademarks and IP rights for this software.

Cognosys Provides Hardened images of Magento on the cloud ( AWS marketplace, Azure and Google Cloud Platform).

Deploy Magento securely on cloud i.e. AWS marketplace, Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Magento on Cloud runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud and Azure. Magento on Cloud is built to power innovative e-commerce experiences with the rapid deployment of fully customizable, secure and scalable Web storefronts, combined with a leading hosting and managed services.

Secured Magento on Windows 2012 R2

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