AEM Champion Office Hours: AEM Infrastructure (June 2024)

In this AEM Champion Office Hours session, RENY director Rami El Gamal hosted fellow AEM Champions Brett Birschbach and Greg Dimeris, with Joey Smith, to answer questions about AEM infrastructure, from the basics of each hosting model to CDNs, preview tiers, DevOps and serving sites in China.

What the session covers

• Three ways to run AEM: on-premise, Adobe Managed Services (AMS) and AEM as a Cloud Service, and what really differs between them.
• Cloud Service architecture: autoscaling containers, read-only application code and services that work directly with the content repository.
• Caching and CDN: ETag configuration for browser caching, and using your own CDN in front of Adobe's.
• Publishing: reviewing content before it goes live, and why the preview tier beats a custom "publish to stage" workflow.
• Customization limits: overlays, front-end builds and keeping personal data out of AEM.
• Operations: what DevOps still owns in Cloud Service, and options for audiences in China.

Key takeaways

• Cloud Service is the first real infrastructure change. On-premise and AMS are both "a server with an AEM instance", with AMS adding Adobe-managed uptime, patching and upgrades. Cloud Service scales horizontally by adding containers, so no more upsizing instances before peak season.
• Development stays about 95% the same, but /apps and /libs are read-only, and Adobe's managed CDN sits in front of every environment.
• Bringing your own CDN needs a specific header. Search Adobe's "BYO CDN" documentation for the configuration value your CDN must add to requests.
• Use the preview tier for review. It can be restricted by IP allowlist, so only people on your VPN see it. On-premise, a separate preview publish tier is often possible without an extra license, but check your terms.
• Avoid overlays unless you truly need them. Every overlay is a commitment to maintain it through every Adobe update. Opinionated platforms are what make automatic upgrades possible.
• Build front-end code before it reaches AEM. Minify libraries with webpack in the ui.frontend module rather than relying on AEM's minifier.
• DevOps still matters. Dispatcher configuration, advanced networking and secrets management remain, though how teams divide that work varies.
• Code to Cloud Service rules, even when some sites run elsewhere, to avoid a maintenance nightmare.

RENY's perspective

Cloud Service separates the application from the content repository, which is why newer interfaces, such as the new AEM Assets UI, can work directly with the data and feel more like SaaS. We expect more of AEM to move that way, and this infrastructure, not product policy, is why some features are only available in Cloud Service. On governance, a SaaS model needs strict rules and policies: avoid overlays unless you really have to. For China, even AMS customers typically run a separate topology there, so we suggest caching AEM content within China rather than running two platforms.

What's changed since 2024

• CDN configuration through Cloud Manager has matured, including traffic filter rules, redirects and origin selectors managed as code in the configuration pipeline.
• Edge Delivery Services has become a common front end for AEM sites, which changes how teams think about CDN and caching.
• AEM 6.5 LTS is available for teams that need to stay on-premise or on AMS for now.

How RENY helps

We assess AEM infrastructure, plan migrations from on-premise and AMS to AEM as a Cloud Service, and set up CDN, Dispatcher and DevOps practices that scale. Talk to us about your migration.