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Adobe unveiled Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service(AEMaaCS) on January 13, 2020. It was released mainly keeping assets and sites in mind. It combines the traditional AEM features with cloud agility. I have played around with it and gone through the documentation and here are some of the notable changes.

Brand New Architecture

AEMaaCS has a fully containerised operation. AEMaaCS further abstracts its hardware layer, taking care of dynamically scaling the infrastructure both vertically and horizontally when needed. Earlier, AEM needed a complex infrastructure with several servers that were expensive to support. I am not going into detail of the architecture as Adobe's documentation covers it pretty well.


Deployment and Upgrades

  • AEMaaCS is always up to date. Clients don't have to go through a painful process to upgrade their AEM servers.
  • Adobe Managed Services(AMS) now handles maintains maintenance on AEMaaCS. It is all automated. Tasks like data store garbage collection, version purges, compaction, audit purges etc are all managed by Adobe. 
  • AEMaaCS has 24-hour point-in-time backup/restore which AMS handles.
  • AEMaaCS currently deployed on 3 Azure regions only.
  • Cloud Manager is now the sole mechanism for deploying code to AEM as a Cloud Service environments. It was an optional content delivery tool for Managed Services, when it was introduced earlier, but is now required. All content and code persisted in the immutable repository must be checked into git and deployed through Cloud Manager.


Asset Microservices

Asset Microservices is a platform service for processing assets for AEM, running completely on top of Adobe I/O. Assets are ingested and then processed for various purposes such as rendition generation. The actual image binaries are uploaded in the binary cloud storage and will not go through AEM. The upload requests are fronted by CDN edge nodes to accelerate the upload of binaries. It is also enabled for dynamic media by default.


Authoring Improvements

The new interface looks like earlier versions of AEM. However, the following enhancements are made in AEMaaCS to improve authoring:-

  • AEM has now provided checkboxes to select pages/assets in the site admin. It makes much easier to select the content. Earlier the content authors couldn't figure out easily how to select a page or an asset.
  • Colours are changed in various authoring areas.
  • Page versioning before deletion is now optional. Earlier the page was auto-archived on deletion.
  • Any live copy source is now a "blueprint", meaning the rollout can now be initiated on a live copy source.


Cost structure

In the past, the number of AEM instances decided the cost. In AEMaaCS the cost of sites is based on the number of impressions. The cost of the assets is based on the number of asset users.


New Reference Website

We.Retail is replaced by a new AEM reference website, WKND. It won't be installed by default going forward, unlike the previous reference website. Instead, it can be installed separately.


Other Notable changes

  • Any content and sub-folders in /apps and /libs are read-only.
  • Direct changes to the publish repository are not allowed.
  • No access to the OSGi web console in the cloud environments.
  • Custom run modes are not possible. Only a few pre-defined run modes are allowed in AEMaaCS.
  • The replication agents used in earlier versions of AEM are no longer used or provided.
  • The Classic UI is no longer available.
  • Communities, Commerce, Forms and Screens are not supported yet.
  • Some of ACS commons features such as Redirect map might not work.
  • No SSH access for AEMaaCS.


Conclusion

AEM is laying a strong foundation with its containerised architecture coupled with cloud capabilities. The new assets architecture will relieve AEM of the load uploading assets and speed up the content authoring process.

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