Introduction to Cloud Manager for AMS

Start here to get to know Cloud Manager for Adobe Manage Services (AMS) and how it enables organizations to self-manage Adobe Experience Manager in the cloud.

Introduction

Cloud Manager for Adobe Experience Manager gives developers the ability to create impactful customer experiences through streamlined workflows, built upon Adobe Experience Manager best practices. CI/CD pipelines optimized for Adobe Experience Manager allow you to easily merge development workflows by simply checking in your code which can then move all the way to being production-ready. During the build phase, your custom code updates are thoroughly tested against best practices to deliver reliable applications for your customers. Cloud Manager uses an open API approach and enables you to integrate with your systems without disrupting existing processes and tools.

NOTE

This documentation specifically describes the features and functions of Cloud Manager for Adobe Managed Services (AMS).

The equivalent documentation for AEM as a Cloud Service can be found in the AEM as a Cloud Service documentation.

With Cloud Manager, your development team benefits from the following features:

  • Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) of code to reduce time to market from months/weeks to days/hours

  • Code inspection, performance testing, and security validation based on best practices before pushing to production to minimize production disruptions

  • API connectivity to complement existing DevOps processes

  • Autoscaling that intelligently detects the need for increased capacity and automatically brings online additional Dispatcher/publishing segments

This image illustrates the CI/CD process flow used in Cloud Manager:

CI/CD flow

Key Features in Cloud Manager

The following is a deeper dive into selected key features of Cloud Manager.

Self-Service Interface

The user interface (UI) for Cloud Manager enables you to easily access and manage the cloud environment and CI/CD pipeline for your Adobe Experience Manager applications.

You define application-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) (such as peak page views per minute and expected response time for a page load) that form the basis for measuring a successful deployment. Roles and permissions for different team members can be easily defined. The self-service interface puts control in your hands, but it also offers links to best practice resources and access to experts within Adobe who can provide the necessary guidance as needed.

To explore and get started with Cloud Manager’s UI, see the document First Time Login.

CI/CD Pipeline

One of the key capabilities of Cloud Manager is the ability to exercise an optimized CI/CD pipeline to speed the delivery of custom code or updates such as adding new components on the website.

Through the Cloud Manager UI, you can configure and kick off your CI/CD pipeline. As part of this pipeline, a thorough code scan is executed to ensure that only high-quality applications pass through to the production environment.

To learn more about configuring pipeline from Cloud Manager’s UI, see the documents Configuring Production Pipelines and Configuring Non-Production Pipelines.

Flexible Deployment Modes

Cloud Manager offers flexible and configurable deployment modes so you can deliver experiences according to changing business demands.

With an automatic trigger mode, code is automatically deployed to an environment based on specific events such as code commit. You can also schedule code deployments during specified time frames, even outside business hours.

Independent of the deployment trigger, quality checks are always performed as part of the CI/CD pipeline execution every time a deployment is triggered. Quality checks include, code inspection, security testing, and performance testing, all of which is delivered out of the box with no effort required from you or your partners.

To learn more about deploying code and quality checks, see the document Deploying Code.

Optional Features in Cloud Manager

Cloud Manager offers additional, advanced feature which may be beneficial for your project depending on your particular environment setup and needs. If these features are of interest to you, please reach out to your Customer Success Engineer (CSE) or Adobe representative to discuss further.

Autoscaling

When the production environment is subject to unusually high load, Cloud Manager detects the need for additional capacity and automatically brings additional capacity online using its autoscaling feature.

In such an event, Cloud Manager automatically triggers the autoscaling provisioning process, sends a notification of the autoscaling event, and brings additional capacity online within minutes. The additional capacity is provisioned in the production environment, in the same region(s) and matching the same system specifications as the running Dispatcher/publishing nodes.

The autoscaling feature applies only to the Dispatcher/publishing tier and is executed using a horizontal scaling method, with a minimum of one additional segment of a Dispatcher/publishing pair up to a maximum of ten segments. Any additional capacity provisioned will be manually scaled-in within a period of ten business days as determined by the CSE (Customer Success Engineer).

NOTE

If you are interested in exploring whether autoscaling is appropriate for your application, please contact your CSE or Adobe representative.

Blue/Green Deployments

Blue/green deployment is a technique that reduces downtime and risk by running two identical production environments called blue and green.

At any time, only one of the environments is live, with the live environment serving all production traffic. In general, blue is the currently live environment and green is idle.

  • Blue/green deployment is an add-on to Cloud Manager CI/CD pipelines in which a second set of publish and Dispatcher instances (green) is created and used for deployments. The green instances are then attached to production load balancer and the old instances (blue) are removed and terminated.
  • This implementation of blue/green treats instances as transient and every iteration of a blue/green pipeline will create a new set of publish and Dispatcher servers.
  • A green load balancer will be created as part of the setup. This load balancer will never change and is what you should point your green or “test” URL to.
  • During a blue/green deployment, an exact replica of the existing publish/Dispatcher tiers will be created.

Blue/Green Deployment Flow

When blue/green deployment is enabled, the deployment flow differs from the standard Cloud Service deployment flow.

Step Blue/Green Deployment Standard Deployment
1 Deployment to author Deployment to author
2 Pause for testing -
3 Green infrastructure is created -
4 Deployment to green publish/dispatcher tiers Deployment to publisher
5 Pause for testing (up to 24 hours) -
6 Green infrastructure is added to the production load balancer -
7 Blue infrastructure is removed from the production load balancer-
8 Blue infrastructure is terminated automatically -

Implementing Blue/Green

All AMS users who are using Cloud Manager for production deployments are eligible to use blue/green deployment. However usage of blue/green deployment requires additional validation of your environments and setup by an Adobe CSE.

If you are interested in blue/green deployment, please consider the following requirements and limitations and contact your CSE.

Requirements and Limitations

  • Blue/green is only available for publish/Dispatcher pairs.
  • Preview Dispatcher/publish pairs are not part of blue/green deployments.
  • Every Dispatcher/publish pair is identical to every other Dispatcher/publish pair.
  • Blue/green is only available in the production environment.
  • Blue/green is available in AWS as well as Azure.
  • Blue/green is not available to Assets only customers.

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