AEM Champion Office Hours: AEM as a Cloud Service (April 2023)

In this Adobe Experience Manager Champion Office Hours session, a panel of AEM Champions, including RENY director Rami El Gamal, Brett Birschbach and Martin Noble, with host Greg Dimeris, answered pre-submitted and live questions about AEM as a Cloud Service.

What the session covers

The panel works through the practical shifts that come with AEM as a Cloud Service: how the platform scales itself, what Adobe's frequent automatic releases mean for your testing, where security is handled, how configuration differs from on-premise run modes, and how to migrate without losing search rankings.

Key takeaways

• Stop designing infrastructure. Author and publish tiers scale automatically and you pay for what you use. Effort moves from sizing servers to caching well and structuring content.
• Functional tests protect you from Adobe's releases. Releases happen continuously, and they skip the unit-test threshold but not your functional tests, so thorough functional tests stop a release that would break your custom code.
• Content requests drive cost. Cache HTML and assets at the CDN and browser, avoid using AEM as a proxy for other services, combine GraphQL calls and embed small data sets in the page instead of separate API calls.
• Security sits at the CDN. Cloud Service runs behind Adobe's managed CDN with DDoS protection; you can bring another CDN such as Akamai, but it then has to provide that protection.
• Run modes are fixed. Use the standard environment run modes, with environment variables and secrets set through Cloud Manager for values that differ per environment.
• Migrate thoughtfully. Plan incrementally rather than one big bang, use the Best Practices Analyzer for content as well as code, set up local Docker environments that match the cloud, and treat development and stage like production.

RENY's perspective

Our answers in the session covered generic lists, Franklin, SEO and testing:

• Generic lists: content does not belong under /etc in Cloud Service. Move key-value lists to Content Fragments, which give you proper APIs and GraphQL.
• Franklin vs AEM: it is not either-or. Document-based authoring suits fast, templated pages; AEM's component-based pages suit layout-driven content. Choose by business case.
• SEO after migration: split SEO into page content and page performance. Content should not change if the migration is like for like, and performance usually improves because HTML and versioned client libraries are cached at the CDN. For commerce, focus on meaningful, unique URLs, canonical and hreflang tags, using selectors rather than query strings for cacheable dynamic pages.
• Testing: migrations often fall short of the unit-test threshold. Invest in tests anyway, because continuous releases make them your safety net.

What's changed since 2023

• Franklin is now Edge Delivery Services, generally available, and authored with Document Authoring, Word, Google Docs or the Universal Editor, which was in beta at the time.
• CDN and traffic rules are configurable through Cloud Manager's configuration pipeline, which the panel mentions as upcoming. Check Adobe's current documentation and your license for advanced WAF features.
• Content migration tooling has matured, including content copy between environments, which the panel discusses as coming soon.

How RENY helps

We migrate AEM platforms to AEM as a Cloud Service and Edge Delivery Services, with testing, caching and SEO planned from the start. Talk to us about your migration.