The Complete Guide - AEM As A Cloud Service

1
The Complete Guide - 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.
2
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 that
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.
3

• 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?
• 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.
• 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.

4

• This ensures that customers need not worry about
  anything, either horizontally or vertically. The
  manual or automatic scale may be done based on
  requirements.
• 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.
• 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 digital (i.e., shopping) experiences
  across 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 drive
  unique retail strategies. This could include
  transforming the product pages, tweaking checkout
  components, etc.

5

• 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 And How EnFuse
  Can Help
• Since AEM does not feature a plug-and-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 w
  ithin the ecosystem for a smooth transition and
  data flow

6
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 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. Read more about
AEM Implementation here 12 Reasons Why Do You
Need To Work With Experts For Your AEM
Implementation