Adobe Commerce Cloud (formerly Magento Commerce Cloud) offers managed infrastructure, but migrating to it from self-hosted Magento or Open Source is a significant project. After completing 8 migrations, we've refined a checklist that prevents the most common project failures.
Pre-Migration Assessment
Start with a thorough audit: catalog size, order volume, custom extensions, and any server-level customizations (custom cron jobs, shell scripts, non-Composer dependencies). Adobe Commerce Cloud has an opinionated infrastructure — anything that deviates needs to be re-implemented using Cloud-supported patterns (ece-tools, environment variables, custom hooks).
Extension Compatibility Review
Not all extensions are Cloud-compatible. Extensions that write to the file system outside of var/ or pub/media will fail — Cloud uses read-only file systems except for designated writable directories. Extensions that hardcode server paths or require custom Nginx/Apache configurations need to be rewritten or replaced.
The Migration Sequence
- 1Set up Cloud environment (Integration, Staging, Production)
- 2Migrate codebase to Cloud — resolve all Cloud-specific issues in Integration
- 3Data migration: products, customers, orders via database dump and import
- 4Media migration: sync pub/media to Cloud's remote storage (S3-compatible)
- 5Integration testing in Staging with a subset of production data
- 6Load testing against Staging to validate the infrastructure sizing
- 7DNS cutover and production launch
Adobe Commerce Cloud's starter plan has a single production environment with limited customization. Pro plan provides dedicated production, staging, and integration environments plus SSH access for debugging.
