If you've worked in commerce technology for any length of time, you know this reality: modern commerce architecture is both incredibly powerful and incredibly complex to manage.

Microservices, containers, and cloud-native deployment offer genuine advantages: flexibility, scalability, and the ability to iterate quickly on different parts of your platform. But they also come with a significant operational burden that many teams underestimate.

Your architects find themselves writing infrastructure code instead of designing APIs. Your developers spend time debugging deployment issues rather than optimizing user experiences. Your product teams wait longer for features because coordinating deployments across multiple services takes careful planning.

This operational overhead is real, and it's why we built Broadleaf Cloud.

What We Actually Built

Broadleaf Cloud is our managed hosting solution for the Broadleaf platform. Instead of trying to reinvent infrastructure management, we built on top of managed services provided by GCP, AWS, and Azure. This approach allows us to eliminate the operational work that doesn't differentiate your business.

The approach is straightforward: we handle the infrastructure lifecycle so your team can focus on commerce functionality.

What we manage:

• Kubernetes cluster provisioning and maintenance
• Database provisioning, patching, and replication
• Security patches and system updates
• Network configuration and ingress management
• Backup, monitoring, and disaster recovery setup
• PCI Compliance

What remains under your control:

• Application code and business logic
• Deployment strategies and rollback decisions
• Performance optimization choices
• Data architecture and integrations

The goal isn't to hide complexity's to handle the parts that are the same for everyone so you can focus on what makes your commerce experience unique.

The Developer Experience

We designed the platform around reducing friction in common development workflows.

The CI/CD pipeline follows established patterns: code gets tested automatically, deployments happen consistently across environments, and rollbacks are straightforward when needed. We also set up security scans, including static code analysis and Docker image vulnerability scanning, as a standard part of the pipeline. The environments, development, staging, and production run on identical infrastructure configurations to eliminate environment-specific issues.

The observability stack includes metrics collection, log aggregation, and distributed tracing, all configured out of the box. Teams can immediately see application performance and diagnose issues without spending weeks setting up monitoring infrastructure.

These aren't revolutionary concepts; they're well-established best practices that we've implemented consistently, so teams don't have to build them from scratch.

No Lock-in by Design

One concern we hear frequently about managed services is vendor lock-in. We addressed this directly in our architecture decisions.

Every Broadleaf microservice that runs on our platform can run elsewhere, on Azure, GCP, or your own infrastructure. The containerized services, configuration patterns, and deployment structures are portable.

This design choice matters because it changes how you can approach your infrastructure strategy. You might start with our managed service to accelerate initial development, then migrate specific services to your own infrastructure as requirements evolve. Or you might run some services with us while keeping others internal for compliance or integration reasons.

We have customers using exactly these hybrid approaches, which validates that the architectural portability works in practice.

Enterprise Requirements

Enterprise commerce platforms have specific operational requirements that can't be compromised.

Security is implemented through defense-in-depth at multiple layers: network isolation, access controls, automated security updates, and secure-by-default configurations. We handle the foundational security measures that are consistent across all deployments so your security team can focus on business-specific risks.

Availability comes from redundant components, automated failover, and the tuned self-healing characteristics of Kubernetes. The platform handles routine failures automatically and provides tools for managing more complex scenarios.

Scalability happens automatically based on traffic patterns and resource utilization. The system's tuned autoscaling can scale up during peak periods and scale down during lower demand, eliminating the need for manual capacity planning.

These capabilities are built into the platform architecture, not added as afterthoughts.

The Real Value Proposition

The core value of Broadleaf Cloud isn't in any single feature; it's in reclaimed engineering time.

When your team doesn't spend time on infrastructure management, that time goes toward building commerce functionality that differentiates your business. When deployments are consistent and reliable, teams can iterate faster on customer-facing features.

The operational complexity of modern commerce architecture isn't going away, but it doesn't have to be your team's primary focus. There's a difference between architectural complexity that serves your business goals and operational complexity that just consumes resources.

Broadleaf Cloud handles the operational side so your team can focus on the architectural decisions that actually impact your customers and your business outcomes.

Getting Started

While the underlying technologies are well-understood, our contribution is implementing them consistently and managing them reliably.

If your team is spending significant time on infrastructure management rather than feature development, that's a resource allocation problem worth examining. Broadleaf Cloud is one approach to solving it, and we're happy to discuss whether it makes sense for your specific situation.