Adobe Commerce: Update from Adobe on support and upgrades 

We joined the Adobe Commerce webinar on 24th January to kick off the new year with more knowledge. Here’s everything we learned and what you need to know: 

• Adobe has committed to providing  3 years of quality and security patch support for Adobe Commerce versions 2.4.4 and newer! YAY! 
• Adobe will deliver 4 security patches this year (up from 3 in 2022)
• Adobe is moving towards separate composable SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) services

If you’re still stuck on 2.4.0 – 2.4.3 (or even 2.3.7!) you can pay Adobe for extended support to keep you going through the rest of 2023 (see the yellow highlights in the diagram below) but you really need to be working on your upgrade to 2.4.4 or later.

Upgrading to 2.4.4 (or later) will be worth it 

As well as getting some new features and performance improvements, you’ll also get at least 3 years of quality and security patches. And the number of feature version releases (and big upgrades required) will slow down as well (version 2.4.7 isn’t due until 2024), so you shouldn’t need to do any more big upgrades for a while!

As you can see from this diagram, depending on your version of Adobe Commerce, you’ll be covered by quality and security updates for a lot longer than previous versions.

What do these Adobe Commerce updates include?

A -p (known as patch) release is essentially a roll up of all bug and security vulnerability fixes since the last Adobe Commerce release. No new features or breaking changes, just smaller bug fixes. These typically don’t break any custom or 3rd party integrations and extensions and are a lot less risky to install.

Usually there are only 2 or 3 of these -p patch releases per year. But Adobe is committing to 4 of them in 2023:

Release	Versions	Pre-release Date	General Availability Date
March 2023 Feature + patch release + security patch release	2.4.62.4.5-p22.4.4-p3	February 28, 2023	March 14, 2023
June 2023 Feature + beta patch release + security patch release	2.4.7-beta12.4.6-p12.4.5-p32.4.4-p4	May 30, 2023	June 13, 2023
August 2023 Feature + security patch release	2.4.6-p22.4.5-p42.4.4-p5	July 25, 2023	August 8, 2023
October 2023 Feature + beta patch release + security patch release	2.4.7-beta22.4.6-p32.4.5-p52.4.4-p6	September 26, 2023	October 10, 2023

Adobe publishes an up to date release schedule, you can access this here.  

As soon as they become available (on their pre-release date) we recommend you start testing them in a staging or test environment. There is no reason to wait for their General Availability release date. The quicker you’ve tested and installed them the safer your Adobe Commerce store will be.

GENE is a Gold Adobe Commerce partner, take a look at our Adobe Commerce services. 

And don’t forget, for any high-impact security or quality issues, Adobe will still issue hotfixes outside of these -p release dates if needed and they will also be rolled into the next -p release.

What about those composable SaaS services we mentioned earlier?

Adobe is pushing a lot of the new features and functionality of Adobe Commerce into separate cloud services which run independently from the core Adobe Commerce (Magento) codebase, such as Live Search and Product Recommendations (powered by Adobe Sensei). These integrations and platforms are fully managed, hosted and updated by Adobe themselves, so no security patches or upgrades are required for these services. One less headache for you and/or your developers/agency to deal with! 

We’ll be sharing more information about composable SaaS and what it means for the future of Adobe Commerce in a future blog post, so keep an eye out for that soon.

Want to know more about Adobe Commerce upgrades and patching? Speak to us today. 

Our dedicated Magento / Adobe Commerce specialists work closely with our Adobe partners to help our clients develop and maintain innovative solutions on the Adobe Commerce platform.