Everything You Need To Know About AEM As A Cloud Service

Users expect personalized and connected experiences across several channels of business interaction. Favorably, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), a modern and purpose-built platform, makes this possible by offering digital asset management and facilitating content-led experiences.

 

Adobe made AEM available as Cloud Service in January 2020. The much-anticipated announcement brought along a volley of changes for marketers using this application. In fact, Gartner has named Adobe a leader in "Digital Experience Platforms" in 2022 (for the fifth year running). 

As for Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a cloud service, it deploys an innovative and uninterrupted delivery pipeline for the AEM codebase and brings cloud-native agility to the fore for business success.

This helps with increasing resiliency, driving auto-scaling, and bolstering performance - all viable, especially for large eCommerce application implementation. This article sheds light on AEM's capabilities, its implementation challenges, and how EnFuse can assist enterprises in the process.

What Is Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) As A Cloud Service?

As an innovative cloud service, Adobe Experience Manager is the newest offering of the same CMS product line. Customers can continue to deliver personalized and content-led experiences with this application. Adobe defined the AEM as a contemporary, cloud-native application which fast-tracks omnichannel tailored experience delivery throughout the journey of customers.

It has a container-based infrastructure, which offers API-driven development and a guided process of DevOps. As such, AEM as a Cloud Service lets IT emphasize strategic results rather than operational concerns. Moreover, the service comprises industry-leading cloud applications designed for hybrid CMS as well as Digital Asset Management (DAM).

Each of these applications can scale to meet the rising demand of the leading global corporations. Powered by data insights, AEM as a Cloud Service also optimizes the workflows of developers and marketers throughout the content lifecycle, not to mention the benefits it accrues for designing digital experiences across eCommerce channels.

What Is Different In AEM Cloud Service?

AEM runs natively in Adobe's Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud, which makes it relatively different from Cloud Manager and Adobe Managed Services offerings. In this application, Adobe automatically manages and provisions AEM instances occurring in the Docker containers. Kubernetes manage them with shared file storing and the latest provisioning model giving backup. 

For end system users, the process is the same, which includes the Cloud Manager to provision, the AEM UI, and Adobe Experience Cloud tools integration. However, this change is fundamental for architects, developers, and system engineers. It accelerates performance and provides progressive AEM capabilities together with flexibility. 

Key Features Of AEM Cloud Service

• AEM as a Cloud Service follows cloud-native AEM implementation along with service-oriented architecture. So, users do not experience downtime. 
• In the cloud, AEM is constantly updated with the latest features regularly without downtime.
• AEM is also redesigned to isolate code from content. An instance contains code packages only. This is an inventive architecture paradigm that helps create as well as recycle cases on the cloud. 
• With this application, a separate microservice handles assets more efficiently than before.
• It provides exceptional CDN for files, assets, and images. 

What Are The Benefits Of AEM As A Cloud Service?

1. Better Availability

AEM as a Cloud Service ensures service availability – ALWAYS ON. No downtime means happy customers. Earlier, it would be necessary to stop services for maintenance from time to time. For instance, the services were always interrupted by upgrades, patches, and routine maintenance. That is not happening anymore. 

2. Scalability

Default sizing is the most promising benefit of AEM as a Cloud Service. All instances are created the same. The application is built on Kubernetes, an instrumentation engine, which constantly tracks the service state, scaling up/down dynamically, depending on customers' needs. This ensures that customers need not worry about anything, either horizontally or vertically. The manual or automatic scale may be done based on requirements. 

3. Newest Code Base Updates

Perhaps one of the most beneficial and much-anticipated features that AEM as a Cloud Service delivers to customers. Adobe updates all the running illustrations to its newest code base. The updates are pushed silently to ensure no downtime. 

4. Self-Sustainability

AEM as a Cloud Service follows the Always Learning mode. The content, configurations, and code are constantly monitored, reviewed, and inspected against the latest best practices. This guides customers to achieve business goals. Periodic health monitoring and self-healing are a part of the AEM cloud service. 

AEM's Viability For eCommerce

When it comes to eCommerce, AEM plays a significant role. With the powerful Digital Asset Management (DAM) functionality through content management, marketing, analytics, visual creation, and integration, it is now an approved technology for eCommerce. 

More profoundly, AEM empowers marketers to enhance the digital (i.e., shopping) experiences across the eCommerce channels. We're talking about expediting a personalized experience on mobile, across the web, and all the other social channels where the brand's eCommerce initiatives are active.

The platform hands control by allowing concerned personnel to customize page components and driving unique retail strategies. This could include transforming the product pages, tweaking checkout components, etc. At the same time, it also allows profound insights into product-related information. This includes a granular (albeit holistic) view of the SKUs, product information, product pricing, etc. 

Challenges Of AEM Cloud Service & How EnFuse Can Help

Since AEM does not feature a plug-n-play key, implementation becomes complicated. And that's why a lot of technically intricate challenges come to the fore when you start with development. For instance:

• AEM Cloud Manager follows strict CI/CD channel checks for quality. It indicates that you should focus only on test-oriented progress having 50% or more test coverage. 
• At present, AEM as a Cloud Service does not support AEM's Adaptive Forms and AEM screens, but that does not encumber the existing services. 
• To support the version-less solutions, the AEM baseline image shall receive continuous updates on the cloud. For personalization over the libs granite or UI console, an internal node is not possible because it is replaced with baseline image updates.

At EnFuse, we help ease up these challenges by offering prudent guidance across:

• Digital experience design
• Enterprise (eCommerce) tech stack platform configuration
• Content and data migration & setup
• Performance testing
• Application security
• Enterprise integration with related applications within the ecosystem for a smooth transition and data flow

We understand that digital transformation and migration are intense activities that demand solicitous planning and vigilant execution. Evaluating the present content for source, type, and the current state is essential. At the same time, cleaning, sanitizing, and fixing apparent issues related to mapping, encoding, and tagging old content is also important. Besides, defining content hierarchy is the key. 

Takeaway

Moving to the AEM as a Cloud Service has several advantages. Owing to continuous updates, the system is always up-to-date with all the recent fixes. Moreover, when you move to cloud-based solutions, it reduces maintenance and infrastructure costs. Collaborate with EnFuse Solutions for a smooth shift.