The Magento 2.4.4 Preparation

Adobe intentionally kept all the premium reporting services, B2B functionalities, and marketing tools available in its paid version of Magento - Magento Commerce. But that doesn't mean the free Open Source version is neglected. Both versions undergo similar coding standards and are developed at the same time and may be by some of the same team members. If you are a small and medium business- the online sale is not going to be large (large number of products/SKUs, financial turnover) then sticking to the Open Source one will be less expensive. 

Bear in mind, the built-in features of Magento Commerce that you are missing out on can be accomplished using 3rd party plugins and tools. Even some of the premium themes now come with a large number of extensions that not only provide those features but add additional features which the paid version doesn't have. 

Choosing premium extensions and themes from Magento's premium partners can ensure you can maintain your site in a more tension-free manner.

Adobe Magento team has published an Installation Flow page to guide the Magento enthusiast and professionals to follow the correct route to deploy the environment correctly before deploying the platform. You can check the link here - https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/install-gde/install-flow-diagram.html

I have often taken up deploying Magento for testing certain functionality parts of managing a project and I was very frustrated as most of the instructions mentioned in blogs or YouTube did not work for me. I was not alone, the comments section was full of frustrated comments not able to see the same results mentioned by the authors. I was annoyed and appalled by the fact that many of the so-called authors were copying from various sources without even testing the commands and results in their own environment. 

I decided to put together this series of deployment instructions to share with you the way I have installed it in my test environment. Hopefully, this will help you to complete your deployment in a less frustrating manner.

In terms of choosing OS, Red Hat Linux is not a free Linux Distro as it is no longer an Open Source software. It is managed just like any other OS requiring paid licensing. It is the choice of many large enterprises for various reasons. For small and medium companies it doesn't make sense to pay for this licensing cost but again the cost does come with a very stable environment with great support.

That leaves us with Ubuntu, CentOS, and Debian. Ubuntu has been very active in the Linux world and as a distro has managed to become a trusted distro in the enterprise area as well. CentOS has seen several changes and they are part of Red Hat Linux (RHEL) but keeping themselves Open Source. But 2021 has seen CentOS taking different directions leaving me to believe Ubuntu would be the best choice for most of the Magento adopters.

So my choice of OS is Ubuntu. BTW - Ubuntu is based on Debian. Please note, Ubuntu has a desktop, server, and core edition for IoT and Robotics. I would always advise going for an LTS release. At this moment Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) is the most tested and stable version that can be used for your development, testing, and production environment.

Apache HTTPD and Nginx (and other web servers) are designed to do one thing, serve data over HTTP(S). Software-based web servers are usually doing this and executing code. Besides that, on a broader level, it also serves static file contents which include CSS, javascript, images, and more helping applications overhead. It also helps in load-balancing which can help you to scale out your front end without scaling your back end. You will be serving your contents securely or through HTTPS. Both Apache and Nginx can handle HTTPS very well which brings up the important point of security which both have very strong codebase and support. In fact, putting Apache or Nginx in front of your software protects it from probe attacks, hides its identity, and can manage access to it.

Magento supports both the popular web servers and often Magento professionals choose either of them based on a few factors which are debatable.  The reason I have chosen Apache over Nginx is it equally has a great performance record after version 2.4 was released and the most important part is - it supports PHP out of the box. If you install Nginx, you need to carry out a number of configuration changes that can add to your stress level. In fact, many of the steps by step instructions shared over the blogs and vlogs have so many readers expressing their frustration in configuring Nginx to process PHP is a clear direction for me to use Apache.

PHP is an acronym for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". In order to generate results from the database which will be updated on a regular basis, a server-side scripting language is required. This scripting language will generate dynamic page contents which will be published in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Text. PHP code is executed on the server, and the result is returned to the browser as plain HTML.

Not only will it publish content but PHP can create, open, read, write, delete, and close files on the server. It can also collect data and then can add, delete, modify data in the database. PHP can send and receive cookies, control user access, and encrypt data.

Over the years PHP has been made to run on various platforms - from Windows, Linux, Unix to Mac OS X. Most importantly it can run on all the web servers including Apache, Nginx, IIS, and more.

The new Magento supports PHP 8.1 which is much faster than the previous popular releases. Speed is a vital part of the performance besides improved error handling, new operators, and much more. 

MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. Over the years this DB management system has undergone various upgrades making it one of the most popular DB systems in the www world. The co-founder of MySQL, Michael Widenius after Oracle acquired MySQL created the MariaDB based on MySQL source code. MariaDB is also supported by Magento.

Since there are two popular DBs are supported by Magento, the debate goes on about which should be used. Magento only uses MySQL features compatible with MariaDB. MariaDB may not be compatible with all MySQL features. There have been numerous reports that reindexing (a very common process of Magento) takes more time compared to MySQL. Please note, the latest MySQL 8 removed Query Caching which is a feature that may help with Magento performance in certain circumstances.

I have chosen to use MySQL because version 8.0 has a good track record so far, backed by Oracle, it is undergoing constant updates and has great support from the open source community as well.

Elasticsearch is a powerful analytics and full-text search engine that stores data in JSON format. It’s open-source, developed in Java, on top of Apache Lucene. This was also the reason why I chose Apache as the webserver.  Widely used for building complex and performant search functionalities, Elasticsearch has many popular clients worldwide, including Netflix, Facebook, and Adobe.

Based on its main feature anyone can question why to use this engine when MySQL DB is already running behind the scene. First and foremost, Elasticsearch is excellent at doing what traditional databases can’t do: full-text search. Both relational and non-relational databases are very slow when it comes to this search technique.

Theoretically, RDBMS should be able to handle such queries but it will take a combination of operators like LIKE, AND, OR to produce the type of results that Elasticserch will produce. But if the dataset is large, it will be a huge performance issue using the RDBMS. Moreover, Elasticsearch can handle typos very easily and knows all about relevance. It also allows us to write complex queries using its REST API. Besides, Elasticsearch is fast, distributed, scales extremely well, and has failover mechanisms in place to avoid data loss.

One of the biggest features introduced in Magento 2.3  and thereafter is the full-text search. Based on the above info you can easily understand why Elasticsearch is so essential for Magento 2.4.4. The developers of various Search extensions are taking advantage of Elasticsearch.