:quality(75))
January to March 2022 was preparation for one of the biggest shifts in the Adobe Commerce (Magento) 2.4 line. Teams got PHP 8.1 ready, validated OpenSearch and planned the removal of vendor-bundled extensions ahead of 2.4.4 — and then a critical security event landed in the middle of it.
OpenSearch readiness
Adobe signposted OpenSearch 1.2 as the new default for cloud and the strategic path for on-premise. For a lot of estates that meant infrastructure changes and reindexing rehearsals. We pushed clients to test relevance configurations early, confirm memory and JVM settings, and get observability around indexing and search latency in place, so regressions surfaced quickly rather than in a support ticket.
Extension housekeeping
With VBEs removed in 2.4.4, Braintree excepted, teams audited their modules and mapped each dependency to its supported Marketplace equivalent. It was a good moment to prune duplicate functionality and swap ageing modules for supported ones, which makes every future upgrade shorter.
The February zero-day
CVE-2022-24086, and then CVE-2022-24087, disclosed via APSB22-12: a pre-authentication vulnerability already seeing limited exploitation in the wild. It called for out-of-band hotfixes, compressed testing and stakeholder alignment on very little notice. Where a playbook existed, it earned its keep. Where it did not, teams wrote one at speed and promised to formalise it afterwards.
What a good emergency looks like
Separate lanes. Keep security-only releases isolated from feature work, and cut clean branches for rapid hotfix and patch adoption.
Minimal test packs. Automate the essentials — checkout, payments, order placement, admin login — and run the full regression later.
Change windows. Schedule emergency windows with clear comms and a rollback, and record the actions and outcomes for audit.
Post-incident. Rotate credentials where appropriate, review logs for anomalies, and fold what you learned back into the runbook.
What this means for you
Q1 was equal parts preparation and practice. The teams that used the quarter to tidy extensions, validate OpenSearch and actually exercise their incident response walked into April's 2.4.4 release calm, with a clear path to production. The ones that did not found out what they were missing at the least convenient moment.