PCDIGA: A plugin-free vision of composability

The breaking point

The PCDIGA team ran their shop successfully on Magento in the 2010s. But when, by 2019, infrastructure costs were rising exponentially and the delivery of new features was regularly blocked, the company turned to Porto-based ecommerce agency Skrey Software.

For several years, Skrey overcame Magento's limitations to deliver market-leading ecommerce experiences for PCDIGA. Costs no longer grew exponentially but remained astronomical. And implementing PCDIGA's bold ecommerce visions such as a custom PC builder was difficult or impossible. The reason? Magento and its monolithic, plugin-based architecture.

Pulling the plug on plugins

When Skrey took over PCDIGA's Magento platform, it inherited a litany of issues: performance, reliability, scalability, feature delivery - you name it. At the onset of the project, Magento had seemed ideal: a feature-rich monolith easily customized through plugin modules. It's the “easily” part of the claim that broke down in practice.

With Magento, if you are writing modules, you need to consider the compatibility of the whole system.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Skrey correctly predicted that off-the-shelf plugins from multiple vendors would be unwieldy maintenance-wise. It also found that maintaining and extending its own plugins was a terrible burden. Magento pushed minor upgrades every 2 months and a major upgrade annually. With each upgrade, the team had to update the core, update their modules, and test everything - a laborious process that wasted developer hours and lowered team morale.

It got crazy. A major Magento upgrade tied up two developers for an entire month and “minor” ones took almost half that. And the DX was so terrible that we had trouble retaining junior and senior PHP developers.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

Strangler pattern

PCDIGA's feature-rich ecommerce platform presented a replatforming challenge. In years past, the company had employed a high-risk, all-at-once, deployment strategy. That approach allowed PCDIGA to move quickly with changes to their ecommerce system, but increased the risk of disruption to their CX and operations. For the replatform to Saleor, Skrey undertook a smoother, lower-risk approach that leveraged Saleor's composability.

A “strangler pattern” was employed wherein each of the old monolith's modules were replaced by microservices. Features powered by Magento were systematically moved to Saleor after each had been thoroughly tested. As a result of Skrey's planning, PCDIGA experienced minimal, planned downtime in its move from Magento to Saleor.

Best-of-breed at PCDIGA

PCDIGA chose to go from a best-of-suite to a best-of-breed ecommerce strategy. By being a monolith, Magento tries to address all ecommerce-related issues: catalog management, checkout and order management, CMS, customer service, you name it. This is all fine until you hit the limits of each one of those areas.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

Despite its flexibility, Magento's catalog model was terribly inefficient in catalog/product management. For example, adding or removing a single product attribute meant reindexing the entire product catalog - an annoying time suck for a catalog with over 70,000 products.

Magento's CMS was also very limited. Things got complicated fast when PCDIGA tried to build their own complex landing pages. Their marketing teams were bogged down in messy HTML + CSS code and struggling to make things work well on the custom storefront.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Saleor’s headless architecture and composable design translates to real business value for PCDIGA. Instead of thinking about the internals of the ecommerce platform, each team works with its own preferred set of tools. There was no need for additional training or operational disruption in the product, order, or stock management areas. In fact, the PCDIGA team does not even use the Saleor ecommerce Dashboard. Post-migration, the team simply continued operating smoothly with SAP for product and order management.

Saleor allowed PCDIGA to choose the right tool for each job, rather than relying on a single swiss-army knife for every task.

João Ferreira, Engineering Manager at Skrey

From self-host as default to cloud as default

Coming from Magento, PCDIGA was accustomed to running its ecommerce platform in-house. Following that tradition, the Skrey team assumed it would self-host Saleor and had already built some devops tooling for it. But after thoroughly testing Saleor Cloud and following several discussions with Saleor's engineers, Skrey was satisfied with the cloud's security, privacy, and scalability - and has never looked back.

The pricing seemed reasonable, so we recommended PCDIGA go cloud. With cloud, we can always move a client to self-hosting so it's an easy recommendation to make.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

One of the biggest benefits of going Cloud is access to the delivery team. Different to our past experiences, the Saleor delivery team's support is always prompt, direct, and professional.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

Eliminating downtime, enhancing performance

On the old Magento site, unplanned downtime averaged around 60 minutes every month. The causes were all Magento-related - stuck indices, data corruption in cache, database issues, and general platform instability. Big, black-Friday style sales were extremely stressful.

Despite the team's best efforts to scale up the infrastructure, Magento timeouts were common. This resulted in lost orders, upset customers, and an overworked ecommerce team.

To deploy something to production with Magento, we had to do database upgrades, which meant up to 10 minutes of downtime. This, plus unplanned downtime, meant PCDIGA's customers were frustrated with the shopping experience.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

With Saleor, the Skrey team has now eliminated unplanned downtime. And the performance gains have been dramatic. GraphQL requests that took 40 seconds on Magento, for example, now take less than 0.4 seconds on Saleor - a 99% reduction.

The platform doesn't block us. We deliver new PCDIGA features quickly. And we're doing it all at a reasonable, predictable cost, which makes our client happy.

Helder Rocha, Managing Partner and CSO at Skrey

Saleor: a plugin-free, composable solution

Skrey briefly considered alternatives to Saleor, but dismissed them as more modern versions of Magento's flawed plugin-based approach to extensibility.

We looked at Medusa and a couple of others, but they weren't tech agnostic. You still end up with the Magento monolith and the plugin problems.

Mário Bessa, Managing Partner and CTO at Skrey

With Saleor, Skrey found an extensibility model it could believe in: with apps fully-isolated from core code and from one another. In contrast to plugin-based architectures, Saleor apps do not directly touch database or core files. Instead, ecommerce data and functions are accessed solely through Saleor's GraphQL API and webhooks.

For a technical overview of Saleor’s extensibility, please check our docs.

Saleor's extensibility model freed Skrey from the headache of merge conflicts between PCDIGA's bespoke apps, core code, and third-party apps. It also enabled Skrey to accelerate innovation at PCDIGA. A bonus was that Saleor's tech-agnostic model allowed apps to be written in any language and on any framework.

Saleor's tech-agnostic approach to extensibility allowed us to work independently on multiple independent work-threads. We were building as many as six apps at one time. We've built 11 apps for Saleor and it's a breeze.

João Ferreira, Engineering Manager at Skrey