AEM Champion Office Hours: Cloud Manager (May 2023)

In this AEM Champion Office Hours session, moderated by Brett Birschbach, a panel of AEM Champions, including RENY director Rami El Gamal, Max Barrass and Vengadesh Shanmugavelu, answered questions about Adobe Cloud Manager, the deployment and operations tool for AEM as a Cloud Service.

What the session covers

• What Cloud Manager does: building, testing and deploying code, plus read-only access to logs and the Developer Console for debugging.
• Monitoring: how to get logs into tools such as Splunk or New Relic, and when to alert from tests rather than logs.
• Configuration: why OSGi settings cannot be changed without a deployment, and what to use for values that change often.
• Governance: who should have access to pipelines, and how to fit Cloud Manager into an existing Jenkins or Azure DevOps process.
• Immutable areas: what you can and cannot customize in Dispatcher and the repository, and why.
• Adoption: the most common blockers when teams move to AEM as a Cloud Service.

Key takeaways

• Cloud Manager is not Jenkins. It deploys and enforces Adobe's quality gates. Keep your own Git repository for pull requests and approvals, and push to Adobe's repository only when code is ready.
• Limit who can run pipelines. Not everyone with repository access needs Cloud Manager access. Automate the trigger from your own pipeline so deployments stay governed.
• Alert on what matters to the business. Logs are for diagnosis. For critical journeys such as lead forms, run automated tests on a schedule and alert directly when they fail.
• OSGi configuration needs a deployment. For values that change often, use Cloud Manager environment variables, context-aware configuration or content that authors manage, instead of OSGi settings.
• Immutable means protected, not limited. Adobe locks parts of the platform (like a corporate laptop's security settings) but gives you room for valid customizations such as Dispatcher rules, templates and content.
• Ask whether the customization is the right approach before forcing a tool to do something it was not designed for.

RENY's perspective

We treat Cloud Manager as a read-only window into logs and the system console, where the only write action is a deployment. On one enterprise project, pull requests ran through the client's own Jenkins and code quality checks, and a script started the Cloud Manager build once code reached development. On a lead-generation site, we tested every form several times a day and alerted the team directly on failure, because a broken form mattered as much as the site being down.

When teams move to Cloud Service, the biggest blocker we see is often fear of the unknown rather than a defined technical problem. For authors, little changes: they still drag and drop components. The fundamentals that do change, such as horizontal scaling and immutable code, are worth explaining early.

What's changed since 2023

• Bring your own Git: Cloud Manager can now work directly with your own GitHub, Bitbucket, GitLab or Azure DevOps repository.
• Configuration pipelines deploy CDN rules, log forwarding and other settings without a full-stack build, and log forwarding to tools such as Splunk, Datadog or New Relic is supported.
• Rapid Development Environments let developers test changes in the cloud in minutes, without running a pipeline.

Check Adobe's current Cloud Manager documentation for what applies to your program.

How RENY helps

We set up Cloud Manager pipelines, governance and monitoring for AEM as a Cloud Service, and migrate teams from on-premise and Managed Services. Talk to us about your migration.