AEM as a Cloud Service is the latest member of the growing AEM family of products and it offers some significant advantages over the previous AEM products – AEM on premises and AEM Managed Services. It represents the biggest jump for AEM in a decade.
As other cloud services AEM as a Cloud can give your organizations serious performance boost, major improvement of the stability and accessibility of your AEM systems, it could take care of most of your AEM maintenance work and also simplify the development and distribution of custom software for your AEM instances. AEM as a Cloud is always on, always at scale, always current, and always evolving.
By comparing the new AEM as Cloud versus having AEM instances running on your own server we can see where many of the advantages of the new service offered by Adobe come from.
Architecture and Environments
If your organization uses AEM on premises then most likely you are maintaining several servers for the Author and Publish instances as well as their Web servers for AEM Dispatchers and on top of that possibly a Load Balancers like F5 as an entry point for your clients or content users. All that is probably maintained by your teams. New content is probably transferred from Author to Publish constantly or even vice versa. Updates need to be performed on premises and if you decide to upgrade to the next AEM version this might take weeks. All that would no longer be the case if you moved to the Cloud as Adobe will offer as many Author and Publish services you need and they will will be maintained and updated regularly.
AEM as a Cloud offers dynamic architecture with variable number of AEM instances with no downtime for maintenance tasks. How is Adobe able to achieve that when your organization could have thousands of pages and assets? When you create or upload content into AEM as a Cloud it will be stored separately from the actual Author or Publish services that your users or customers will use. All the processing of that content like creating asset renditions will also be executed separately on the Datastore where your content is held resulting in noticeable performance boost and also allowing for a quickly scalable architecture based on the actual traffic and activity.
In other words, Adobe can quickly create or remove new Author or Publish instances for you on the fly depending on your organization’s needs. Not only that but a Continuous Delivery Network (CDN) is also available as the first entry point of the Publish service so your customers will have the best possible performance when accessing your content.
Your AEM Cloud Service during regular or low traffic:
Autoscaling to help the increase in traffic:
In regards to your development team, AEM as a Cloud is offered as complete AEM environment with individual instances including Development, Stage and Production. Big advantage here is the fact that Adobe will maintain those for you, of course, so the Development environment will run under the same runtime conditions as the other two and the Stage environment will always be coupled to a single Production in 1:1 relationship. Adobe will also perform various performance and quality tests before changes are pushed to Production.
AEM Assets as Cloud Service
AEM as a Cloud is offered for both AEM Assets and AEM Sites. In regards to Assets in the previous AEM on Premises architecture all assets operations were meant to happened on the AEM Author instances. This of course requires maintenances, takes virtual as well as actual space and could use considerable processing and memory resources. These high demands could lead to undesirable performance issues for end users.
AEM Assets as Could solves simplifies all that by having Adobe hosting, creating and removing AEM instances for you and also hosting your assets in separate binary storage or Datastore where the greater processing power of the Cloud can be utilized in your advantage. This separation of AEM instances and your Assets allows for the quick on the fly creation of new AEM instances if necessary. There are also several other benefits – the asset post processing is no longer be based on the usual asset workflows executed on the author but on micro services running on the Cloud over your asset in the Datastore.
Your development team can implement their own micro services as custom software. They’ll also have access to Cloud capabilities as AI and Machine Learning. The new binary storage where assets would actually reside can be fronted by CDN significantly improving the end user experience.
The Classic UI is no longer available on AEM as Cloud and the new Touch UI is the default way of interacting with Assets. This can also be achieved using Adobe Asset Link or the AEM Desktop app. Your developers could also create their own application for accessing Assets utilizing the new HTTP API for AEM as a Cloud.
AEM Sites as a Cloud Service
As with Assets as part of the old AEM on Premises software, Sites portion of always had to be deployed, replicated and managed on several instances. By switching to AEM Sites as a Cloud your organization can again benefit greatly from the above-mentioned advantages as automated high scalability, always on, always available and always current, AEM Sites as well as having your Publish instances fronted by CDN for the best user experience.
Some additional advantages come from the Cloud ability to perform Asynchronous Page Operations so task like Moving or Rolling-Out pages which would traditionally block the UI would be broken to smaller tasks running in the background. Adobe now also offers new AEM reference site called WKND and new set of tutorials to reflect best practices and the new set of capabilities of AEM Cloud Sites.
How does all these 6 technical advantages actually reflect your AEM website?
- Your website will practically always be available with no downtime
- You’ll always be using the latest AEM Sites and Assets versions
- Adobe will create or remove new Sites instances for you to respond to the increase in traffic and your users will have the best possible experience.
- Your sites content will be delivered as close as possible to the end user thanks to the Adobe CDN
- Your site will be more secure as your AEM will always be secured to latest level from Adobe
- The license model will be based on your usage which helps with the low cost of ownership.
For further information on how to get onboarded on on the AEMaaCS – please contact us.
[contact-field required="1" type="name" label="Name"/] [contact-field required="1" type="email" label="Email"/] [contact-field type="textarea" label="Message"/]