Four parts of an Adobe Commerce Cloud store belong to Adobe, and a merchant leaving has to replace each one.
Fastly. Adobe provides the Fastly service on Staging and Production environments, and its documentation (updated June 2, 2026) lists HTTP caching and CDN, DDoS protection, origin cloaking, image optimization, and custom VCL snippets, with the web application firewall available on Pro and Starter Production environments only, together with a Domain-validated Let's Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate for each Staging and Production environment. Adobe documents those custom VCL snippets as Varnish 2.1 compliant, so they do not drop into a self-hosted Varnish install unchanged. Budget a VCL rewrite, a replacement WAF, a replacement image pipeline and new TLS termination.
Build and deploy. magento.app.yaml,.magento/services.yaml and the ece-tools package describe a platform that stops existing at cutover. Cloud supplies service credentials through environment variables such as MAGENTO_CLOUD_RELATIONSHIPS, so app/etc/env.php has to be written for the new environment before the first deploy runs. The replacement pipeline belongs in the statement of work by name.
Database. Adobe documents Pro production as three virtual machines behind an Elastic Load Balancer with an HAProxy per VM, running a Galera cluster with one MariaDB per node and an auto-increment setting of three for unique IDs across every database (updated May 14, 2026). Entity and order IDs therefore advance in threes. Anything downstream that assumes contiguous increments, such as ERP order intake, accounting exports or a warehouse system keyed on increment_id, has to be tested before the cutover date.
Media and shared files. The same Adobe page documents GlusterFS handling four directory mounts: var, pub/media, pub/static and app/etc. Off Cloud, media normally moves to Amazon S3 through the Remote Storage module, which Adobe documents for Commerce 2.4.2 and later and describes as having limited support on cloud infrastructure (updated August 19, 2026). Adobe states the sync command migrates files in pub/media and not the import and export files in var, so the var directory needs its own plan.
On the merchant's own side of the line, four things still break at cutover even though Adobe never owned them: cron topology and background job timing, transactional email IP reputation, hardcoded server paths inside custom modules, and every third-party service still calling the old egress IPs.
Timing. Adobe publishes no timeline for a move in either direction. The rebuild of Fastly, the deploy pipeline and media storage happens before any DNS change, so ask each shortlisted firm for the go-live date of a named store it moved.
Cost. Adobe does not publish list pricing for Adobe Commerce, so the comparison has to be built from a quote. Four lines decide it: the Adobe license, the hosting or AWS bill, the operations headcount that runs the platform, and the one-off migration project. Cloud folds hosting, Fastly, the WAF and platform operations into a single Adobe invoice. Self-managed splits the same functions into a license, an infrastructure bill and either a DevOps hire or a retainer. Ask for a three-year model with all four lines shown separately, because a single blended number cannot be compared with another agency's.
The route onto Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service carries one warning. Adobe's documentation (updated August 20, 2026) states that Adobe Commerce as a Cloud Service does not support Luma storefronts, and describes its Commerce Developer MCP as AI-assisted modernization of the Commerce application that accelerates the migration of customizations to App Builder and supports storefront transformation to Edge Delivery Services. Its Commerce Data Migration Service supports first-party core commerce data only and does not handle custom, third-party entities. Adobe adds that data held in custom tables by third-party extensions is identified during assessment and is not handled by the standard data migration. For a heavily customized store, this is a rebuild.