Magento

Choosing Hosting platform for Magento : Digital Ocean

One in a while you may want to check on the technology and options available for Magento hosting – technologies change, hosting costs reduce, life becomes easier for you and the merchant. In this multi-part series we will explore cloud platforms and their suitability to hosting a production Magento website.

In this article we will explore how seriously you should consider Digital Ocean as a platform for hosting.

Digital Ocean (DO) offers VMs it calls “droplets”. With an excellent blog and a friendly attitude towards developers, DO is a serious hosting contender. Many developers naturally recommend using DO to merchants for hosting Magento. How real is it? Let me explore a few pros and cons.

DO Choice of vCPU and memory

DO offers “shared CPU” and “dedicated CPU”. For eCommerce hosting we always prefer dedicated CPU. Shared CPUs work differently on all cloud providers and quite often when you need it the most, you do not get enough. Each vCPU is a Intel hyper-thread. As of this writing (July 2020), we see use of Intel Xeon Gold 6140 @ 2.30 GHz with DDR4 memory at 2.6 GHz. Our simple memory speed test showed about 1.8GHz effective throughput to memory.

DO disk : Love / hate relationship!

I love the disk speed – you get good SSD performance with no throttling. Even for attached storage. Unlike other cloud platforms, you don’t have to juggle with figuring out how many IOPS you need, once you understand for that platform how IOPs translates to speed.

To test the disk I use a simple but effective method to test the disk speed. I create a file with /dev/zero using dd of 1GB. dd gives me the write speed. Here is the command I use :

dd if=/dev/zero of=$tempFile bs=1M count=1024 conv=sync oflag=direct
tempFile has the path to a temp file in the mounted disk I am testing

For both direct disk as well as mounted block device we see 200-350 Mbps disk speeds across all droplets our customers use. This is the best we have seen in cloud platforms. Physical hardware can give upto 450Mbps speeds.

So, why the hate?

We have seen disk crashes – thankfully on staging servers. So, when it comes to production servers, we always recommend customers to have a DR plan to minimize loss of data when this happens. Our suspicion is that the storage is not in a managed RAID, hence a disk crash is a droplet specific event.

Network

File transfer speed test

: A large file transfer using scp on the internal network is done in about 130 MB/sec – about a 1 Gb/sec speed.

NFS

NFS of block storage performs poorly. We use nfscache so most reads are served from cache. However, if there is a need for a large number of reads or writes, the performance can drop dramatically.

Examples of NFS hurting performance

Magento 1 : As images are created in the frontend, there is a check to see if an image file exists before an image url is included in a page. This invariably results in slowdown.

Magento 1 and 2 : large log files. Magento stores log files in a shared folder. Multiple lines per hit of logs will result in slowdown.

Experience :  We were in the process of taking a Magento 2 website live that had about 2500 errors written to a log file. The issue was related to M1 migration resulting in some attributes not defined in M2. App servers saw 30% CPU in I/O wait and the site came to a crawl. Php access logs showed under 10% CPU utilization.

Non availability of autoscale

DO does not come with an autoscale option (you could get autoscale in their Kubernetes which we are not considering here). This means you may have to keep capacity for a holiday sale for example.

Managing server costs

Server costs even when you shut them down

DO charges for servers that are shut down. If you do not want to be charged fully for a server, storing an image is an option.

Recommendation

We host customers on Digital Ocean if they do not have a need for scaling and are willing to have a DR plan. This generally increases the cost of the overall solution.
Also stores that do not need scaling such as :

  • PWA – Vue-storefront based stores which use nodejs
  • A high hit ratio varnish FPC magento store (depends on many factors, but essentially requirement for scaling multiple app servers is less likely)

 

July 31, 2020 By hosting, Magento, performance, PWA, scale, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

How Magento can get near 0 downtime deployment

Factor III of the 12 Factor App says “Store config in the environment”.

12 Factor App is what devops lives by – a set of 12 principles written by Adam Wiggins for predictable web app deployments.

Storing configuration in environment, separate from code has the advantages of reliable deployment along with reduced time to deploy. It allows separation of the build stage from the deploy stage, with some deploys being just a change in a softlink to the web root folder.

Historical preview : Magento 1

Magento 1 did not have much of a build process – js and css were not versioned, magnification was “online” first access based as was database upgrade information, configuration was stored in the database.

The most reliable way to go from a dev configuration to a live configuration would require a set of known steps that would work or changes directly to the database.

luroConnect developed its own build and deploy process. In our build step we

  • get source code from git
  • minify css and js files in the skin and js folders using a grunt based process
  • set appropriate file ownership and permissions

During the deploy phase, we

  • Copy app/etc/local.xml from a secure deployment configuration area (our environment)
  • modify the core config data to add a version string in the skin and js URLs
  • access the website once through the index.php to cause the update scripts to run

Deploy process is of course run with the site in maintenance – we prefer to do this at the nginx level. Mostly it is a small blip.

Historical preview – pre Magento 2.2

Early Magento 2 builds were similar – except there was some help from the bin/magento command. Our deploy process did not need to version the static access anymore. Plugin enable / disable was given via config.php. Our deployment environment contained env.php.

However, developers had to manually configure and experiment with some options.

Site bringup required devops to access the admin panel or update the database with custom sql – enabling varnish, setting up CDN with a static URL, etc.

Magento 2.2 and beyond

Magento adopted the direction of the 12 factor app and presented in Magento Live UK 2017 a new set of features that would help in ensuring an ability to split the application configuration and environment configuration. Application configuration was defined in app/etc/config.php which is advised to be in git and hosting environment and secure details are kept in env.php which should not be kept in git.

It is a slightly weak conformance – as commented by 12factor app “This is a huge improvement over using constants which are checked into the code repo, but still has weaknesses: it’s easy to mistakenly check in a config file to the repo; there is a tendency for config files to be scattered about in different places and different formats, making it hard to see and manage all the config in one place. Further, these formats tend to be language- or framework-specific.”

Magento has fixed this in 2 ways

  1. The language specific aspect is addressed to some extent in Magento by allowing to use bin/magento cli to edit env.php for sensitive data. The config:sensitive:set directly writes to env.php. These commands no not require the database, hence, can be set in a pre-deploy step.
  2. Use of scoped environment variable names. These would be set in Nginx configuration or an include file such as fastcgi_params.

However, there is no documented way to set database details – except to manually edit the env.php file.

The app:config:dump command

A great help in maintaining a known configuration of the application (which 12factor app suggests be committed to git). This ensures communication between developer to operations.

The app:config:dump command writes to config.php and env.php. While config.php is suggested to be committed to git, env.php should not be committed to git.

If a value is in config.php, the Magento admin panel does not allow the parameter to be edited. This locking helps with giving stability to the application configuration. It ensures the application is developed and tested with a known configuration.

The figure alongside shows the suggested flow.

Suggested flow for using app:config:dump

Why is Magento deployment yet keeping site in maintenance?

However, we find that even after 2 1/2 years of announcement, the acceptance and understanding of these features is weak. Leaving websites in maintenance mode as code is deployed.

Developers are failing to maintain a discipline to own the configuration or devops to understand the application’s build and deploy process.

There are some practical problems as well. An eCommerce manager would like to have control on the live website on say, when backorders would be allowed storewide. Since this is locked in config.php, this request has to go through developers or devops.

luroConnect near 0 downtime deploy

luroConnect’s Magento 2 build is in a pipeline – such as a bitbucket pipeline. A commit triggers the pipeline that does the following

  • composer install (with the compose cache to speed this process)
  • bin/magento setup:di:compile
  • bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

The contents are then tarred and sent to the staging and production servers.

Upon deploy the contents are untared, deployment related files like env.php are copied, media and var are softlinked. The web root softlink is changed to point to this new release. The process is slightly more complicated when multiple autoscale instances are running, as running instances are replaced with ones with new code.

If required the bin/magento setup:upgrade command is run and only then is it required to keep the site in maintenance.

Would you like to switch to a modern hosting platform?

Schedule a call of a free evaluation!

With features like ~0 downtime code deploy and autoscale to reduce your hosting costs, luroConnect offers you unparalleled hosting environment for Magento.

Schedule a call and we will show you how we can

  • Improve your hosting, possibly with autoscale
  • Have a managed dev, staging and production environment
  • Server performance measured every minute with alerts for a slowdown
  • A multi point health check every day
  • Optimized hosting costs
Click here to schedule the call
May 5, 2020 By devops, hosting, Magento, Nginx, scale, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

12 factor app and Magento

Adam Wiggins’ 12 factor app (https://12factor.net) is a highly respected standard for web apps. While written with SaaS applications in mind, let us explore and see how Magento and the ecosystem stands up to these factors.

1. Codebase. One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys.
Magento is in git and hence a typical Magento project should not have a problem with this.
However, if you use vue-storefront, a popular PWA frontend to Magento, this is broken. Vue-storefront has 2 repos of its own in addition to the Magento repo, all becoming one app.
Another violation happens when a plugin vendor gets ssh access to your live server to fix a plugin issue. Plugin vendors have a serious problem integrating their code into multiple source bases without Magento supporting a versioned plugin architecture out-of-the-box.

2. Dependencies. Explicitly declare and isolate dependencies.
With composer Magento solves this problem.
Violation of plugins is a case in point – many plugins are installed not as composer dependencies. Instead they make it to the merchant repo.

Magento uses php and typical websites are deployed using php-fpm. One may argue that the php-fpm plugins that Magento depends on are not explicitly declared. Leading to the application not working exactly in 2 environments. Another case in point is dependency on php version.

3. Config. Store config in the environment.
12 factor app requires environment variables to be used. Magento has split application and environment configuration between config.php and env.php.
Here is what 12 factor says.
“Another approach to config is the use of config files which are not checked into revision control, such as config/database.yml in Rails. This is a huge improvement over using constants which are checked into the code repo, but still has weaknesses: it’s easy to mistakenly check in a config file to the repo; there is a tendency for config files to be scattered about in different places and different formats, making it hard to see and manage all the config in one place. Further, these formats tend to be language- or framework-specific.”

However, Magento has worked towards this. Specifically, with bin/magento config:set and bin/magento config:sensitive:set commands are a useful way for hosting providers to be 12 factor compliant.

luroConnect has always stored hosting configuration settings separately from the release. Upon deployment of code, the contents of deployment folder are copied. Sometimes they have settings for the application. These include hosting specific as well as sensitive settings. We are moving to using config:set and config:sensitive:set for versions of Magento that support it. We will also move towards storing sensitive variables in secure key stores.

4. Backing services. Treat backing services as attached resources.
“Resources can be attached to and detached from deploys at will.”

While Magento is very good at storing key connections outside the application and database, violations exist in 3rdparty plugins. To “ease” the deployment most store credentials and connectivity details in the database. Another issue is with SMTP plugins, instead of depending on magento’s default use of localhost and let postfix configuration manage the actual email sending, developers see the convenience of storing this information in the database.

Check out this post on SMTP and postfix configurations.

5. Build, release, run. Separate build and run stages.
Magento has been improving the code deployment process. The setup upgrade is the only command that, if needed, requires the site under maintenance.

6. Processes. Execute the app as one or more stateless processes.
Twelve-factor processes are stateless and share-nothing. Any data that needs to persist must be stored in a stateful backing service, typically a database.

Magento is very good on this count if used with nginx and php-fpm.

7. Port binding. Export services as port binding.
“PHP apps might run as a module inside Apache HTTPD” is flagged as a violation if the apache is also used as a webserver.
nginx + php-fpm gives the best isolation and performance of any stack. Php processes can be independently controlled in a server running php-fpm while nginx can be used for routing and handling web requests, terminating SSL, etc.

8. Concurrency. Scale out via a process model.
Magento is very good at this. Aided by php-fpm process model that complies with the 12 factor app, it is possible to build a cluster to handle only checkout urls for example, with routing handled by an application load balancer such as nginx.

9. Disposability. Maximize robustness with fast startup and graceful shutdown.
While Magento and php are good at this, some notes are in order.
A reload of php-fpm by default will kill all php processes even though they may be executing a request. Ensuring no new traffic is coming to the php-fpm, and waiting for draining by checking the status for number of active processes (with a timeout ofcourse) will ensure gracefulness in shutdown.
In order to ensure robustness against sudden death of the php-fpm process, it is best to keep the queue length (listen.backlog) to a small number. Turns out managing the queue to scaleout helps in application performance as well.

10. Dev/prod parity. Keep development, staging, and production as similar as possible.
The 12 factor app describes 3 gaps – time, personnel and tools. Based on our experience, the personnel gap is eliminated by automation. A commit trigger based automated CI/CD pipeline with an automated deploy to staging and production ensures there is no personnel gap.

A development environment with write access to git can be created with a similar infrastructure to help developers debug issues.

11. Logs. Treat logs as event streams.
Magento allows creation of multiple log files. Modern logging such as monolog allows more control of what is and what isn’t logged. Logs are also generated by nginx, php-fpm and other services used.
Streaming logs for querying and analysis is typically done by your hosting provider.

luroConnect uses fluentd to capture logs. Logs are sent to our Insight service, which analyzes data per minute, hour or day.

12. Admin processes. Run admin/management tasks as one-off processes.
Magento supports cron and rabbitmq based processes. In addition, setup upgrade is also used to change the state of the database during deployment.
However, suggested access to developer for “run arbitrary code or inspect the app’s models against the live database” is not recommended by luroConnect due to security and the risks of the application stability with the state being altered arbitrarily.

April 29, 2020 By devops, hosting, Magento, Nginx 0 Comments Read more...

Magento emails & SMTP

Emails are a very critical portion of an eCommerce website. There are 2 types of emails that are used – transactional and promotional.

Transactional emails are emails the eCommerce system sends for regular customer activity – such as order confirmation email. It may also include abandoned cart email, wish list reminders, password change, etc. If a website visitor action causes an email to go out, it is a transactional email.

In this article we will discuss the best way to configure transactional email sending in Magento. This article applies to both Magento 1 and Magento 2. The focus is on what happens on production systems.

The SMTP Plugin

Traditionally Magento agencies and developers install a “SMTP Plugin”. A simple search in Magento marketplace for SMTP reveals many options. Some are general plugins that allow you to connect to any SMTP provider, others are from vendors such as SendGrid.

Advantages of such plugins are

  • Easy setup
  • Developer testing is easy
  • Websites on shared hosting have to use such a plugin

However, for growing websites, this is a particular problem

  • Outgoing ports from the application server may not be open
  • Many SMTP providers have restrictions such as rate limit on email sending or number of connections. Some SMTP plugins may not handle this condition well – just reporting the error vs trying to send again.
  • They may not be able to alert when email sending is down
  • When upstream providers’ SMTP service is down or slow, cron will slow down as each email times out on sending. (Magento sends emails in cron).

Using postfix

By default, Magento sends emails to the local system where php is running. Linux systems have many options for receiving such requests and sending out the emails. A popular software is postfix. While postfix can directly send emails to the recipients’ email systems, we are interested in the “relay host” mode of postfix. In this mode, postfix acts to relay emails sent to it from Magento to the upstream provider – such as SendGrid.

Advantages of postfix

  • Postfix has an inbuilt queue. When the upstream server’s rate limit is reached, a “defer” status is returned. Postfix understands this and it will queue deferred emails and keep retrying. Emails are not lost.
  • Magento cron will deliver to local postfix in a matter of milliseconds, freeing up cron to perform other activities.
  • Connections can be pooled so if many emails are in queue they will be pooled together and sent using a single connection. Some SMTP servers, notably gmail, have a rate limit on the number of connections.
  • Log files that can be checked by system admins. Log files can also be sent to a log collection tools. Advanced commands help checking the queue, even trimming it using conditions such as email subject.
  • Flexible configuration allows many features – on a staging server for example, only whitelisted recipients can receive emails, preventing accidental trigger of email to customers. Or emails to known spammers can be filtered by email id or domain.

Installation and configuration

Installing postfix is easy – the package is part of any linux system. For RHEL based system like CentOS :

sudo yum -y install postfix
sudo yum -y install cyrus-sasl-plain cyrus-sasl-md5

Configuring postfix to act as a relayhost.

Click on the tab below to see configuration information for the specific SMTP service being used. Commands below should be run as root (or sudo). Ownership of files created, especially the password files is assumed to be root.

Sendgrid

  1. Sign in to SendGrid and go to Settings > API Keys.
  2. Create an API key.
  3. Select the permissions for the key. At a minimum, the key must have Mail sendpermissions to send email.
  4. Click Save to create the key. SendGrid generates a new key. This is the only copy of the key, so make sure that you copy the key to clipboard and use if for the next step.
  5. Create the hashmap from the key 
    echo [smtp.sendgrid.net]:2525 apikey:{{{PASTE}}} >> /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
rm /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db
  6. Add to postfix configuration file main.cf 
    cat >> /etc/postfix/main.cf <<EOF
smtpd_tls_security_level = may
# enable SASL authentication
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
# tell Postfix where the credentials are stored
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
header_size_limit = 4096000
relayhost = [smtp.sendgrid.net]:587
smtp_tls_CAfile =/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
EOF
  7. service postfix restart

Mailgun

  1. Signup for maligun account.
  2. Get credentials for maligun. Mailgun has an option for SMTP username and password under the Domains section of the mailgun portal.
  3. Create the hashmap from the key 
    echo [smtp.mailgun.org]:2525 {{user}}:{{password}} >> /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
rm /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db
  4. Add to postfix configuration file main.cf 
    cat >> /etc/postfix/main.cf <<EOF
relayhost = [smtp.mailgun.org]:2525
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_tls_CAfile =/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
EOF
  5. service postfix restart

Amazon SES

Amazon SES is the most cost effective SMTP provider to our knowledge. However, it is also the most difficult to setup as it requires you to verify sender emails and sandbox mode (which we will not consider here).

  1. Login to your aws account
  2. Select “Simple Email Service” from the services
  3. Select Domains from the left menu
  4. Click “verify a new domain”
  5. Enter domain and click on verify
    SES will generate the TXT records you need to add to your DNS

    SES will also generate the DKIM CNAME record to be added to your DNS
  6. Ensure domain verification green status
  7. In the SES main screen, select “Email Addresses” from the left menu
  8. Enter the sender email address. Sender email address are set in Magento. Depending on your Magento configuration different emails may need to be configured. Each email needs a mailbox as a confirmation email is sent to it.
  9. Refer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-credentials.html to create SMTP credentials. Note username and password.
  10. Depending on the region your SMTP endpoint (relayhost setting in the main.cf below) will be different. Refer https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/smtp-connect.html
    Note : The region of SES is unimportant in that there are no restrictions from where the email is sent. Your Magento instance can be anywhere – not even on AWS.
  11. Save password 
    echo [email-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com]:587 USERNAME:PASSWORD >> /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
postmap /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
rm /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
chmod 600 /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd.db
  12. Update main.cf 
    cat >> /etc/postfix/main.cf <<EOF
relayhost = [email-smtp.us-west-2.amazonaws.com]:587
smtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtp_sasl_security_options = noanonymous
smtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/sasl_passwd
smtp_use_tls = yes
smtp_tls_security_level = encrypt
smtp_tls_note_starttls_offer = yes
smtp_tls_CAfile =/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
EOF

Advanced configurations

Postfix relay gateway

In a more mature environment, each php server may not be able to send on SMTP ports. Even in the presense of a NAT gateway, we would recommend a main postfix gateway to ease logging and prevent loss of emails when an instance is lost in autoscaling. With postfix we can create a relay – php servers are configured to send email to a designated email gateway server which in turn relays to the SMTP upstream server.

Sending promotional emails

Promotional emails should ideally not originate from your website – instead they should be from your marketing tools. However, Magento does support sending promotional emails. To improve deliverability of crucial transactional emails, we recommend using a different sender email domain for promotional emails. If this is configured in Magento, postfix can handle sending promotional emails from a upstream service different from the transactional service. Assuming username / passwords have been created in the SMTP service for the promotional domain, the following configuration allows selecting the relayhost to use based on the sending domain.

cat << /etc/postfix/main.cf >>EOF
smtp_sender_dependent_authentication = yes
sender_dependent_relayhost_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/relayhost_map
EOF

cat << /etc/postfix/relayhost_map >>EOF
user@promodomain  [smtp.xxx.com]:{{port}}
EOF

Add the new domains passwords as the first line in /etc/postfix/sasl_passwd

user@promodomain  {{user}}:{{password}}

luroConnect and Magento emails

The configurations described above are abridged versions of what is used in luroConnect. We use the advanced configuration with a designated server allowed to communicate on port 587 to the outside. We also use secure keys to ensure passwords are not saved in chef cookbooks / configurations. Instead they are stored in a secure key store.

Interested in knowing about the advanced architecture of luroConnect?

Fill the form below and we will contact you.


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March 20, 2020 By hosting, Linux System Administration, Magento, performance, Site Speed 0 Comments Read more...

Magento 1 end of life

June 2020 is a few weeks away and many stores are not ready to move away from Magento 1. But wait, you don’t have to update – now or in the long run.

COVID-19 Update : We find many customers have had to delay their Magento 2 launch in these uncertain times. We also know many of them did not have plans to keep Magento 1 uptodate. In fact, we know agencies that have stopped support for Magento 1.

Starting at a low cost of $200 per month with no long term contract. It includes reviewing your current hosting for security, moving your website to the latest Magento 1.9 and latest php supported as well as adding additional security measures to your website. It also includes help signing you up for Mage One or Open Mage projects for support beyond Magento 1 EOL, if required.

Signup now (no credit card required) and we will be in touch with you.

What does end-of-life for Magento 1 mean?

Magento 1 End-of-Life does not mean your website will stop working. It means Adobe will stop giving fixes for Magento 1, even security patches. As php version in use goes out-of-life, no upgrades will be given by Adobe.

However, being an open source platform, your Magento 1 website will not stop working. The code and license do not restrict you from running the website.

Stay on Magento 1 for short or even long term

That is a valid option and many customers are choosing this. Makes sense if

  • You have a lot of investment in the customizations which may be difficult to replicate anywhere
  • You have a stable money generating store and any change looks like a risk
  • Are in the process of migration, but the migration may take some time

What are the options to stay on Magento 1?

  • Use paid support plan from Mage one (https://mage-one.com).
    luroConnect is a partner and we will apply the patches for you as they are released.
  • Use open source Magento 1 fork (https://github.com/OpenMage/magento-lts) with support from the community.

What are the risks?

  • Support from either of the above reduces over time as many websites move out of Magento 1
  • Developer support may reduce as most developers move to Magento 2
  • Plugin vendors have already stopped support or are stopping support.

Magento 1 and PCI

Many merchants received email from or read their post and advice move to another platform after June 2020.

It refers to PCI / DSS Requirement 6 – excerpted here with highlighting for relevance of discussion.

Your Magento 1 store software has many vendors, including Adobe / Magento for the core, but also plugin vendors. Since it is open source, you are free to modify the core and take the responsibility and other requirements may apply.

By switching to an alternative vendor for the Magento 1 core – such as Mage-One or Open Mage, in our non-legal opinion, you are not on Magento 1 any more and do not have Adobe as your vendor. If a plugin vendor does not give security patches to your Magento 1 plugin any more, it is important to take over the plugin code responsibility as a separate contract.

PCI does not have a vendor approval process. However, your vendor may need to justify satisfying some other requirements for safe and secure coding practices.

However, by not recognizing your core application, you may need to talk to PayPal as a merchant to get PCI approval. This would include scans.

luroConnect Support for Magento 1 past EOL

We have built add-on package for Magento 1 EOL support. We have a 4-point plan to support you.

From EUR 29

Mage-One Patches for post EOL Magento 1 support. Will satisfy PCI vendor requirement.

mage-one logo

From EUR 99

Sansec eComscan examines a store for malware, vulnerabilities and unauthorized accounts. Written by well known security expert Willien De Groot, it scans files, databases and 3rd party components of Magento.

From USD 50*

Inbuilt into our Nginx, with M1 rules, protects from OWASP Top 10, with the ability of virtual patching.

From USD 50*

Staging environment to ensure patches are tested before taken live.

* This is in addition to our fees for WAF and staging environments if not included in your support plan. Customer pays for hosting costs of staging server.

How we protect you

  1. File system security to prevent 0-day or new unknown vulnerabilities. Strict file and folder permissions prevent uploads to folders that execute code
  2. Support for Magento 1 Nginx rules not allowing execution of php from skin and  js or php from media. This rule will prevent many malicious code to fail as they depend the ability to upload malicious code and execute.
  3. WAF – Web Application Firewall – with strict Magento 1 rules. This prevents SQL Injection and cross site scripting related attacks from being allowed.
  4. Virtual patching – block URLs that are known to have vulnerabilities. For example, we do not allow saving of the “miscellaneous” header and footer section from being written from the admin login.
  5. Partnership with mage-one to get the latest patches and keep your site uptodate.
  6. Admin login protection via dual password. The first is a basic http challenge. This reduces password guess of the admin URL as 2 passwords have to be guessed.
  7. Password guess prevention by restricting how many failed attempts are allowed in a day from the same IP – implemented at the application server level without changing Magento code.
  8. Staging environment to test patches from open mage or mage one or any other source you may have. Also support php version upgrade first on staging before upgrading production.
  9. Protect source code by using secure deploy process
  10. Secure backup With a proven restore strategy
  11. Support for our secure deploy process that ensures 0 downtime during code deploy and not have git folder in the hosting folder. An ability to rollback by switching to any previous deployed version is an added advantage.
  12. System components upgrade – including php. As versions of php approach their security end-of-life and support for higher versions appear in patches, php version will also be upgraded.
  13. Partnership with Sansec for their eCommscan scanning product.

We can analyze your site for free

Schedule a call

Not happy with your website performance and want an expert to look at it?

  • We will analyze your site using public information.
  • We will ask you to give us a 1 day web server log file.
  • We will try to identify what steps if any you should take to improve your sites performance goals.
Click here to schedule the call

Hosting help moving to Magento 2

When moving to Magento 2, to reduce the downtime during the move, luroConnect has plans for you.

  • Staging server support plans.
  • Magento 2 transition plan with minimum downtime. Our care even includes URL rewrite rules to ensure SEO value is not lost during transition.
March 6, 2020 By hosting, Magento, Security 0 Comments Read more...

Meet Magento India 2020 – panel discussion

I was on a panel at Meet Magento India 2020 #MM20IN moderated by Brent Peterson of Wagento.

It was an honor to be part of a elite panel – Miguel Ignacio Balparda of Nexess / Liquid Web, Shehzad Karkhanawala of Webscale Networks, Arun of ServerGuy. The discussion was lively and well received.

While the time was too short to address all the questions, Brent was kind enough to circulate the questions ahead of time.

Here would be my responses if there was enough time!

  1. What are some of the latest trends you are seeing in the hosting world
    Integrations into application – Magento Cloud as well as pwa vendors are giving hosting included packages.
    Plugins or apps are going SaaS.
    Underlying tech with Kubernetes is changing the hosting world.
    Magento hosting has to look like SaaS to the merchant – with the flexibility.
  2. Hosting as we knew it five years ago has now become a commodity. There are some interesting approaches to hosting in the market today. In your opinion, what defines and differentiates a great hosting provider for e-commerce?
    If you look at progression of economic value – commodities, goods, services, experience. A quick example being you could use ingredients to make a cake (commodities), you could buy a mix to bake a cake (goods), you could buy a cake from a cake shop (services) or you could have your birthday party organized of which cake is a part (experience). Hosting has reached the experience level with SaaS. We have to make that happen with Magento hosting.
  3. You all provide managed hosting services. What is different about managed as compared to regular hosting?
    Managing is offering hosting at a higher level of abstraction.
    Traditionally companies like Rackspace provided a server or a managed server and charged something like $100 per server as managed or support fee. In reality you paid for a system admin.
    When you give a full application level support, you are abstracting away everything.
    While many managed hosting services talk about 15 minute response time to tickets, we measure ourselves differently – we want no tickets. If a customer has to call and tell us their site is slow or god forbid down, we have lost.
    A managed hosting provider sits on the merchant’s side between the developer and the hosting service.On one hand, we ensure the hosting bill is optimized.
    On the other, we ensure we host a 12-factor app – keeping the developers honest about the quality of their delivery. We partner with many developers.
  4. What is the relationship between the customers and the hosting company in a managed service agreement?
    I will give you an analogy – a few years ago I built a house in Bangalore. I hired an architect and a contractor. I made the contractor report to the architect and paid the architect an additional 6.5% as fee to manage the contractor who managed the workers and material. 
    We are like the architect in this example – On the side of the merchant, making things happen on the hosting.
  5. What’s the difference between public and private cloud?
    everything and nothing!
    Private cloud has power, uptime, connectivity and flexibility issues.
    If the private data center addresses some of these issues, there is no difference from managed hosting perspective.
  6. All around the globe, there are big events like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. How do you help your customers prepare for this type of event?  Auto-scaling
    Autoscaling is an obvious, but there is more to the preparation.
    Autoscaling has a latency in scaling.
    We like to understand marketing strategy – if they are sending SMS – which generates a far higher peak than almost any other marketing activity – what time and volume – so instances can be launched We encourage staggering ofcourse but it is difficult to make marketing understand that. We would prep autoscale to have more instances.
    Reduce as many moving parts as possible.
    We ensure code freeze is well before the event.
    Avoid : Product uploads, inventory sync if possible
    Indexing state
    Cache state – ensure all caches are pre-loaded / primed
  7. What are the biggest differences between a hosting environment for Magento 1 and Magento 2?
    • Varnish.
    • core performance (or performance on a miss) is tough to get in M2.
    • Rabbitmq – but we have not seen mature use of this technology as yet.
    • Build & Release process.
  8. What’s your plan for the Magento 1 EOL in June?
    We are ready to support the hosting. Security is a key concern in the longer run, but we have to live with that – react as and when we know what happens. We have merchants that have not changed their code for years. Yet on old M1, php 5.6, etc. which we will not support.
    Others have invested a lot in M1 to move with feature parity. Features on the admin panel that their packaging staff depend on or rules to decide how to ship based on warehouses.
    (During the panel discussion participants talked about hardened php. That applies to php 5.x which means the merchants are running obsolete versions for a while. I think they should at least upgrade to latest Magento and php 7.2 )
  9. Some merchants are just not ready to move to M2 due to cost and timeline pressures.  Is there anything developers and their hosting provider partners can do to help clients continue to operate after June 2020?
    Absolutely. The numbers are so large that I feel a community effort to continue, if it happens, will be much appreciated. I think the hosting community is ready to support – many of us yet support php 5.6 for example as merchants have not recognized the need to move or have unsupported plugins that have not upgraded.
  10. Security has become the most critical piece of an e-commerce merchant’s infrastructure strategy. Cyber-attacks are growing in number, intensity, and sophistication. What can a hosting provider do to protect storefronts from threats?The biggest threat is from 0-day threats and not patching ontime.
    0-day threats are hitherto undocumented or unaddressed threat.    In medicine, when a virus hits, there are 2 strategies – handling the virus directly coming up with vaccines, etc. The other is health related advice – such as wash your hands. Crucial things that sound simple, but are instrumental in preventing someone from being infected across multiple types of viruses.I call these fundamental truths. They address a class of problems.I was an engineer when first viruses came to infect 286 computers. My employer then decided to develop expertise in virus combat. We came up with a simple set of rules that prevented many forms of viruses then. How you booted mattered then for example. What you ran on your computer mattered. I wrote some code that my customer sold to Compaq and ended up protecting millions of computers.We try to make such fundamental truths in hosting. Some are taken into standards like cross site scripting. Brent – when you became a Magento Master a few years ago, you mentioned 777 permissions as a challenge. Magento came up with what they called 2 user hosting – a web server user and a command line user. Others we have developed.We try to take a class of attacks and eliminate them.Ofcourse when a known threat exists, we try to ensure that threat is addressed directly.
  11. What’s your take on the current state of Magento Cloud?
    We have typically  3rd party opinion but from what limited 1st hand experience we have, we find that to be having many restrictions. Autoscale, tuning caches like adding more RAM to varnish, are difficult. But, Magento Cloud is there and will improve. Adobe got SaaS wrong the first time, but persevered and fixed it to be one of the most profitable companies of our time.
    I would really hope Magento stops seeing Open Source as competition. The two depend on each other.
February 3, 2020 By hosting, Magento, Security 0 Comments Read more...

Free as in freedom, not free beer!

Introduction

The open source community has had this saying for long, though there are many, including myself, who do not understand what this difference means.

With recent changes to open source license agreements, this difference has come to the fore. For example, changes in the open source licensing of redis and mongodb has restricted how AWS and other cloud providers can conduct their business. Directly relevant to eCommerce merchants is the effect to open source Magento since Adobe’s acquisition of Magento and the path that has been followed

Magento Open Source vs Enterprise

Adobe’s business reason to have Magento is (in my opinion) to complete their offering. Adobe has seen a huge, public and successful transition from their traditional business of one-time purchase of packaged software to a subscription and even a SaaS model. With the acquisition of Magento and the Commerce Cloud licensing model, Adobe clearly thinks Magento should be packaged with hosting – hence the word Cloud in their offering and their pricing of the Enterprise license that includes cloud hosting. This transition is seen in SAP’s hybris commerce offering that includes hosting to make SAP Commerce Cloud. Unlike SAP hybris though, Magento is open source.

If you accept the Adobe Magento Commerce Cloud offering, you submit to the fixed set of features that are offered by their cloud or subscribe to a SaaS service for integration – though sometimes even that requires qualification or may not be possible.

For example, if you want PWA, you are limited and have to wait for the PWA Studio. If you want an improved search interface, you are limited to their choice. Similarly, for CDN, image optimization and Web Application Firewall, you are limited to Fastly, Adobe’s choice in the matter.

Or, perhaps, you use a plugin that is connected to a SaaS service.

When a Magento website is self-hosted though, the choice was to install a plugin or enhance the code that may require a service which has to be hosted. In the examples above, you may want to use vue-storefront or use one of many systems for search or use ImageMagick as an image optimization solution.

From Free Beer to Freedom!

The earlier licensing model of Magento pushed the decision to a “board level” – companies like ours always take the supported version. Mostly the open source version of Magento was attractive to those who were attracted by the “free beer”.

However, now the decision is that of freedom – since the paid version comes with restrictions.

If you feel guilty of being a taker of open source, you can sponsor community commits back to the open source Magento. The community participation is not negligible. Matt Asay of Adobe suggests it may be as high as 50% in this article.

(Indeed there are community participants who think Adobe is gaining from open source contributions, but that is a different blog article).

Shameless plug!

Full stack managed hosting support from luroConnect, gives you the benefit of supported opensource and the flexibility to build your own solution around it. The entire stack is based open source – from linux to Magento – including nginx, ModSecurity, redis, elasticsearch, sphinx and ofcourse mysql. (We relunctantly also allow ioncube encrypted plugins as well). Coupled with a release process from your git. Hosted on any cloud or open hosting providers – in the age of Uber you don’t need to own your data centers. Our multi-layered security approach and proactive monitoring comes standard. With additional features like a disaster recovery plan, image optimization, peep-hole maintenance and a dashboard to monitor and control key tasks such as code deployment or indexing, we bring peace-of-mind to Magento hosting. Check out our pricing and you can connect with us.

Magento Open Source vs Commerce Cloud

Magento Commerce Cloud does offer additional features. See alongside (zoom for a larger view) for a comparison taken from magento.com. Some key features like WYSIWYG editor will never be released in open source.

However, not everyone needs all of the features and some of these features are available from other plugin vendors or custom development from the many certified and non-certified agencies.

Infact, even if you are a Commerce Cloud customer, you will need customizations and potentially more plugins and even 3rdparty SaaS services to have a fully working store.

Conclusion

Magento Open Source is now a very viable option for all stores – brands and high volume stores included. With many options to customize and integrate, you have the freedom to make your own best of breed solution and not be restricted by the Adobe environment. With Managed hosting service you can get optimized and scalable websites.

August 30, 2019 By hosting, Image, Magento, scale 0 Comments Read more...

Deploying a Magento PWA project

Why PWA might be the future of headless eCommerce

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are designed to address the mobile revenue gap indicated below.

In most markets, online retail has a higher proportional audience reach among mobile users than desktop. However, mobile sales numbers are much lower. There can be many reasons for this, some in the realm of technology.

At one time it was thought mobile engagement was best achieved using an app. This was based on data for mobile users in general, but was possibly skewed towards gaming and social media. An app has advantages of being able to deliver notifications, use mobile features the way a typically website cannot, be installed as an icon resulting in easier access.

On the flip side, there is data suggesting mobile users were reluctant to install apps due to issues like memory limitations. Other disadvantages include a need for an OK from Apple to be on the app store, lack of easy-to-test infrastructure, the rather slow process of distributing updates – for example some users may not have auto update on.

Using service worker technology, widely supported by browsers today, the PWA (or progressive web application) will give some of the benefits of an app without the cost of consuming memory, requiring an OK from Apple and being as easy to deploy new updates as it is to update a website. PWAs are also as easy to test as a website. A PWA will install on a mobile as an icon – much like an app, service workers allow push notifications as well local storage, allowing for some offline capabilities.

From a technology perspective PWAs pose a completely different problem – the relative newness of technology means developers are limited, as are systems to reliably host & deploy. The cost of development will come down as more developers and websites adopt the technology.

Hosting related issues with PWA for Magento

From a hosting and code deployment perspective. Vue-storefront for example, replicates the entire catalog in elasticsearch and uses 2 nodejs processes to run the frontend of the store. PWA Studio is expected to be Magento (read php) native, yet the reference implementation of its Upward Specifcation Is in nodejs. Both developer and production environments pose challenges.

Developer Environment

It is no more a localhost WAMP stack that you can deploy and get a development environment for PWA setup. A single project will require setup of various components (vue-storefront, vue-storefront-api, Magento, graphql, elasticsearch, redis, rabbitmq, etc).

The developer environment will affect the learning curve of the many new developers starting with these new technologies as well as the productivity of experienced developers.

Here are some challenges

  1. Launch a development environment for a new project
  2. Setup a developer environment for an existing project
  3. An ability to change and test any component easily – for example if a js file was modified that affects the UI, what component(s) need be redeployed? Can this process be automated?

It is too early for us to start work on solutions for developers – since we do not do project work ourselves. However, we are working with our partners and we have an eye on releasing a “developer stack”. Contact us if you would be interested.

Production Environment

We recently took a PWA website live. Developed by our partner Codilar, it was a first for us. Some of the challenges faced and lessons learnt are summarized below.

  1. Setting up a production environment.
    Since there were so many components, not natively supported by Magento, many configuration files had to be manually modified.

    1. Vue-storefront (the UI end that replaces varnish in a classic Magento 2) needs to communicate to Redis for Full Page Cache and the vue-storefont-api
    2. Vue-storefront-api communicates with elasticsearch and Magento 2 backend via a rest API. Ideally vue-storefront should replicate the entire catalog through a indexing process into elasticsearch, but that is not fully operational yet.
    3. Magento 2 has its own redis cache and redis session. Magento 2 FPC is not used. Magento 2.3 uses RabbitMQ in addition to connection to its database.
      Here is our architecture for the deployment. We used Virtual machines as shown. We did not use a containerised architecture. The reasons will possibly be a different blog post.
  1. Starting nodejs processes automatically. Vue-storefront uses pm2 for process management. However, developer information and documentation is written using yarn to run the pm2 processes with log files being stored in ~/.pm2. In order for better control from a system administration perspective, we installed pm2 at the global level, generated systemd files (using pm2 startup) and modified them to suit the environment. We can now use “service vue-storefront start/stop/restart”.
  2. Monitoring all the components.
    Log files for each component are taken to a central log processing server using CNCF project fluentd.
    A key challenge is observability of failures. A Magento 2 API failure is not obvious. An error return code from vue-storefront needs to be traced to vue-storefront-api to Magento. Correlating the actual hit that caused a non-fatal Magento error is another challenge.
  3. How to deploy new code with minimum or even 0 downtime
    For Magento 2, until a database change is required (via a bin/magento setup:upgrade and/or indexing), we have a process to make a deployable package, giving an opportunity to deploy with 0-downtime. Check out our bitbucket pipeline presentation.
  4. How can one deploy a vue-storefront based PWA?
    The project we migrated ran on 2 git repos – one for Magento, the other for vue. Upon deploy we need to find the files that changed since the last release and decide if the change is in Magento, vue-storefront or vue-storefront-api and decide the build steps appropriately. Presently since the repos are different, we have 2 separate builds running on the production servers. A pipeline based deploy is our next step.

Note: We think a monorepo for both Magento and vue is essential in the long run due to possibility of versioning incompatibilities.

Conclusion

This is yet early work-in-progress and we hope to update our process and keep updating this article as we go.

August 12, 2019 By caches, devops, Magento, PWA 0 Comments Read more...

PWA in Magento – how do your images look?

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) in Magento opens a new opportunity to improve image quality on eCommerce websites. Use of good quality images has been known for a long time to be the a key factor in digital experience and hence conversions. In recent years many factors have changed that requires a relook at how images are served. These factors include :

  • Shoppers increasingly use mobile devices for eCommerce
  • The vast improvement in the ability of mobile devices to show high quality images
  • Improvement in the mobile internet connectivity speeds with 4G and above
  • Improvement in compression formats with introduction of webp
  • Advancement in responsive UI technology ranging from HTML picture tag and srcset attribute to PWAs that increase the application awareness of the ability of the mobile device

Through PWAs in particular, the app knows enough of the device to decide what pixel ratio as well as width of the image to get, thereby improving displayed image quality to the best possible.

PWA in Magento is now live. To see a curated list of modern eCommerce sites see https://headless.page/.

Analyzing www.hartsofstur.com for image quality

I picked a magento site and analysed for image quality. The site is the beautifully made. The site looks like a standard magento website – except that on click, the page does not seem to refresh (though the address bar changes URL) – only the content does. That is nicely done.

This site is a PWA created using Deity Falcon – a headless open source library built with ReactJS, NodeJS and GraphQL.

The Category Page

When you navigate to a category listing page from the menu, the category view uses API to get details including images.

The API URL for a category looks like this https://www.hartsofstur.com/api/catalog/products/57. (A real URL has layered navigation and other filters appended).

Such a URL returns category information as json. Let us review a snippet below :

See the “thumnail_url” (3 lines below the highlight) in the json is a standard Magento image URL from the cache. The image comes from this API for each element. The thumbnail URL is not device aware as no hint of the device was passed to the category API.

The website seems to return the same image URL (image size 600×600) for any sized device as shown below.

600×600 image is resized to 165×165 in html

600×600 image is resized to 250×250 in html

Device Pixel Ratios


Using higher Device Pixel Ratios, todays mobile phones give a very high quality image display experience to users. HTML tags have been enhanced to allow their usage. However, many eCommerce sites do not use such features.

No CDN

The other notable hosting of this website is that it does not use a CDN. Use of CDN is every more important for PWAs.

Developing PWA for Magento?

Talk to us about how our hosting stack which includes a image generator, can improve the quality of images you display.

Here is how our stack compares with default Magento for image generation.

  Magento luroConnect
When is an image generated? Pre 2.3, synchronous with frontend

2.3, synchronous with product save

 Asynchronous – queued on product save
Webp support No support Supported – needs img tag change
High resolution 2x, 3x, Retina display Possible with img tag change – but makes synchronous problem worse Possible with img tag change – asynchronously generated
Other image optimizations Not possible In the roadmap
such as progressive jpeg

Request for demo

During the demo we will show you how the luroConnect stack can help your website.

  • Improve the quality of images displayed on your website.
  • Block any malacious hits to the site
  • Divert admin traffic to another server
  • Show what a Disaster Recovery Plan can do
  • See site performance on a dashboard
  • Review your current server size and suggest improvements to gain performance and/or reduce costs of hosting (a $100 value)
March 14, 2019 By Image, Magento, PWA 0 Comments Read more...

404 when moving to Magento 2

When migrating platforms for example from WooCommerce to Magento or from Magento 1 to Magento 2, it is imperative that we move all URLs  to ensure proper SEO authority is retained after the move as well as real users get a smooth Customer Experience (CX).

If it is not possible to maintain the same URLs, ensure redirects are made. This is especially true of a move from WooCommerce and also true when as part of the move the store is reorganized. When migrating data, an automated custom URL redirect process is recommended.

In spite of the best planning and intentions it is likely some URLs may be missed and redirects may not be setup.

Failing to do so has 2 negative effects

  • BOTS, especially Google may visit the new site with the older URL and receive a 404. This can reduce your site rating on Google.
  • Users that may have bookmarked or use browser history may get a 404 and get a bad CX resulting in visitors bouncing and reducing brand value.

Google Analytics does not show 404s. Google search console may show if the count is high. Neither of these is a reliable source to know what was missed.

Only the server knows for sure it severed a 404 and would have logged it in the apache or nginx access and/or error log files. On a new migration we recommend automating a 404 report from the log file, atleast once a day.

If using our luroConnect / Edge product, the dashboard can be used to setup a real-time alert for any 404 returned. This can then be actioned by developers or the agency to include a redirect.

Watch our webinar on performance and scaling in Magento

Its free!

Using analogy to vehicular traffic we explain performance and scaling in Magento.
Key takeaways

  • Know how to compare hosting options
  • Importance of good code
  • How to scale
  • Tuning Magento
Click here to schedule the call

We can analyze your site for free

Schedule a call

Not happy with your website performance and want an expert to look at it?

  • We will analyze your site using public information.
  • We will ask you to give us a 1 day web server log file.
  • We will try to identify what steps if any you should take to improve your sites performance goals.
Click here to schedule the call
February 28, 2019 By apache, Magento, Nginx, SEO, Technical SEO 0 Comments Read more...