The Power of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service – The Latest Upgrades

Every year, we are prepared to witness a wave of thrilling innovations, and Adobe surely lives up to those expectations, never failing to impress.

With the advent of 2023, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) has undergone remarkable architectural changes. These transformations amplify the capabilities of AEM as a Cloud Service, providing users with a seamless and powerful content management experience.

Let’s delve into the major architectural changes and unlock the true potential of AEM!

1. Elevating Asset Processing: Fueling Creativity

In the digital age, rich media assets play a crucial role in captivating audiences. AEM now empowers you to unleash your creativity like never before. The enhanced asset processing capabilities enable faster asset rendering, processing, and delivery across multiple channels. Whether it’s images, videos, or documents, AEM’s asset processing engine ensures seamless and efficient content delivery, all while enhancing the overall user experience.

2. Seamless Automatic Updates: Stay Ahead of the Game

With continuous integration and delivery, AEM keeps all projects up to date with the latest version. Updates are categorized into two types:

• Maintenance Updates: These updates primarily include maintenance fixes and security enhancements, which can be released daily..

• New Feature Updates: These updates, which introduce new features and enhancements, are typically released on a monthly basis.

These updates are seamlessly deployed without causing any disruption to the production environment. The composite node store feature in the Oak repository enables rolling updates, ensuring a smooth transition. To ensure system stability, code quality testing, functional testing, and audit testing are performed to identify and prevent any issues that could impact production systems.

In the event of a failed update in the production environment, Cloud Manager automatically initiates a rollback of the staging environment. This automatic process guarantees that both the staging and production environments align on the same AEM version after the update is completed. Overall, AEM as a Cloud Service’s continuous integration and delivery approach ensures frequent updates, minimal downtime, and a reliable and consistent AEM experience for users.

3. Streamlined Publication Process: Efficiency Redefined

AEM as a Cloud Service leverages the Sling Content Distribution capability to efficiently transfer relevant content from the author tier to the publishing tier. This process utilizes a pipeline service that operates on Adobe I/O and operates separately from the AEM Runtime environment.

When a ‘publish’ or ‘unpublish’ request is made, it can encompass multiple resources. However, the response received will indicate the status of all resources together. In other words, it will either succeed for all resources within the AEM Publish Service or fail for all. This ensures that the AEM Publish Service remains consistently synchronized and avoids any potential inconsistencies.

To achieve this, published content is distributed to various queues within the pipeline. All nodes of the publish service subscribe to these queues. This architecture enables the author tier to remain unaware of the exact number of nodes in the publish service. Consequently, the publish tier can swiftly and seamlessly scale up or down as needed, offering enhanced performance and scalability.

This streamlined approach in AEM as a Cloud Service ensures reliable content distribution, seamless synchronization, and efficient autoscaling of the publish tier.

4. Enhanced Build Process: Accelerate Time to Market

Speed and agility are crucial in the digital landscape. AEM as a Cloud Service revolutionizes the build process, enabling faster time to market for your digital initiatives. With optimized build pipelines and comprehensive CI/CD integrations, developers can swiftly build, test, and deploy their applications. This accelerated development cycle empowers your teams to deliver exceptional digital experiences promptly and efficiently. By reducing development time, you can seize new opportunities and stay ahead of the competition.

5. Optimal Operations and Performance: Unleash Peak Efficiency

Ensuring optimal operations and performance is paramount for a seamless user experience. AEM’s new architecture is designed to maximize operational efficiency and performance:

• Firstly, numerous tasks such as indexing, backups, and maintenance tasks have been automated. This streamlines the management process and ensures these activities are executed efficiently.

• Additionally, heavy-load tasks like queues, jobs, and bulk-processing tasks have been offloaded from the core AEM instance. They are now handled by shared and dedicated microservices. This segregation optimizes resource allocation and improves the overall scalability and responsiveness of the system.

• Moreover, the architecture components are equipped with comprehensive health checks. If any node within the architecture is identified as unhealthy, it is swiftly removed from the service. Subsequently, a new and healthy node is seamlessly introduced, ensuring uninterrupted service without impacting the user experience.

These enhancements in AEM as a Cloud Service contribute to a more automated, scalable, and robust platform, empowering users to focus on their core tasks while relying on a highly available and resilient infrastructure.

6. Empowering Development: Embrace Agile Collaboration

Collaboration and flexibility are key drivers of innovation. The revamped development capabilities in AEM foster agile collaboration, enabling cross-functional teams to work harmoniously. The new architecture emphasizes modularity and extensibility, making it easier to build and customize AEM solutions. Developers can leverage modern technologies and frameworks, bringing flexibility and innovation to their projects. By empowering development teams, AEM as a Cloud Service unlocks endless possibilities for creating unique and tailored digital experiences.

7. Unleashing AEM Sites: Building Experiences That Inspire

AEM Sites, the powerful component of Adobe Experience Manager, receives a boost in functionality and flexibility with the latest architectural changes. The updated platform empowers marketers and content authors with intuitive tools to create captivating digital experiences. It includes:

• AEM introduced Asynchronous Page Operations. Actions such as moving pages or rolling out changes now run in the background asynchronously. Users can monitor the progress of these operations through a new user interface located at /mnt/overlay/dam/gui/content/asyncjobs.html.

• A new reference site named WKND has been introduced. This updated AEM reference site serves as a guide for implementing best practices when building websites with AEM. Previously, We.Retail was automatically installed with AEM (except in Production mode). However, going forward, the installation of a reference site by default has been discontinued. Instead, the Git repository and an accompanying tutorial containing the updated code for the WKND reference site are provided.

• There is now a clear separation of the AEM Repository into mutable and immutable content. At runtime, access to immutable content is now restricted. Consequently, certain AEM Sites operations, such as i18n dictionary translations, OSGI configurations, and Developer Mode in the AEM Site page editor, are no longer available during runtime.

The architectural transformations in Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service mark a new era in the realm of content management. The possibilities are limitless with enhanced asset processing, automatic updates, streamlined publication processes, optimized build processes, optimal operations and performance, empowered development, and inspiring AEM Sites. Embrace the power of AEM as a Cloud Service and unlock the full potential of your digital experiences.

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