Magento 2.1.18 is the final 2.1.x release. After June 2019, Magento 2.1.x will no longer receive security patches, quality fixes, or documentation updates.
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Magento Commerce Cloud guide

Magento Commerce Cloud is a managed, automated hosting platform for the Magento Commerce software. Magento Commerce Cloud comes with a variety of additional features that sets it apart from the on-premise Magento Commerce and Magento Open Source platforms:

Cloud Benefits

Magento Commerce Cloud provides a pre-provisioned infrastructure that includes PHP, MySQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Elasticsearch technologies; a git-based workflow with automatic build and deploy for efficient Rapid development and Continuous deployment every time you push code changes in a Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment; highly Customizable environment configuration files and tools; and AWS hosting that offers a Scalable and Secure environment for online sales and retailing.

Technology stack

Think of the Magento Commerce Cloud as five functional layers, as shown here:

Cloud Stack

Amazon Web Services (AWS) powers the underlying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) for Magento Commerce Cloud. Each Magento Commerce Cloud plan provides a PaaS Integration environment for developing, testing, and integrating services, see Magento Commerce Cloud architecture for a comparison and additional features. Performance tools provide granular visibility into the site performance and PHP profiling. Fastly caches site assets and, as customers access the site and stores, loads the cached assets fast. The Fastly Image Optimization (IO) offloads image processing and resizing load, freeing servers to process orders and conversions efficiently.

ece-tools package

The ece-tools package is a scalable deployment tool that simplifies the Cloud upgrade process. In 2018, we deprecated the magento-cloud-configuration and ece-patches packages in favor of providing a single package. We encourage all customers to upgrade to use ece-tools as soon as possible to benefit from the package features, such as commands to create a backup of the database, apply custom patches, and verify environment configuration.

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