Cloud and on-prem run identical Adobe Commerce code. The choice is about operational model and team capability, not features.
The four components of every Adobe Commerce project
Every Adobe Commerce deployment, regardless of hosting model, contains the same four high-level components:
- Core Commerce — the Adobe Commerce or Open Source codebase.
- Frontend enhancements — theme, templates, custom UX.
- Backend enhancements — custom modules, integrations, business logic.
- Hosting — where it runs and who maintains the infrastructure.
On-prem
On-prem can mean a lot of things: bare metal in your data center, a virtualized environment, or a cloud IaaS like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure that you manage yourself. The constant is: you own the operating system, the database, the cache layer, the web server, the deployment pipeline, and the operations practices around all of it.
Adobe Commerce Cloud (PaaS)
Adobe Commerce Cloud is a Platform as a Service. Adobe manages the infrastructure on either AWS or Azure, ships an opinionated CI/CD pipeline, provides Fastly CDN and WAF, and handles the bulk of the DevOps work for you. You still write code and manage your application, but the surrounding stack is theirs.
How to choose
If you have a strong DevOps team, on-prem can be cheaper and gives you more flexibility. If you don’t — or if you’d rather focus engineering resources on business logic rather than infrastructure — Cloud is usually the right answer. Adobe’s preference (and revenue model) point toward Cloud, but the code runs identically either way.
Adapted from the Adobe Commerce Primer, slides 15–16. Last reviewed May 2026.