Notable changes to Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service

Last update: March 22, 2025

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Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service brings many new features and possibilities to manage your Experience Manager projects. There are many differences between Experience Manager Assets on-premise or hosted as Adobe Managed Service as compared to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. This article highlights the important differences for Assets capabilities.

The main differences as compared to Experience Manager 6.5 are in the following areas:

Asset ingestion, processing, and distribution

Asset upload is optimized for efficiency by enabling better scaling of ingestion, faster uploads, faster processing using microservices, and bulk ingestion. Product capabilities (web user interfaces, desktop clients) are updated. Also, these things may impact some existing customizations.

  • Experience Manager uses direct binary access principle to upload and download assets and uses asset microservices to process asset. See an overview of microservices.

  • The default workflow DAM Asset Update in previous versions of Experience Manager is no longer available. Instead, asset microservices provide a scalable, readily available service that covers most of the default asset processing (renditions, metadata extraction, and text extraction for indexing).

  • The website components that deliver a binary file without any transformation can use direct download. The Sling GET servlet is updated to enable this functionality by default. The website components that deliver a binary with some transformation (for example, resize it via a servlet) can continue to operate as is.

The standard renditions generated with asset microservices are stored in a backward-compatible way in the asset repository nodes using the same naming conventions.

Develop and test asset microservices

Asset microservices provide a scalable and resilient processing of assets using cloud services. Adobe manages the cloud services for optimal handling of different asset types and processing options. Asset microservices help to avoid the need for third-party rendering tools and methods (like ImageMagick) and simplify configurations, while providing out-of-the-box functionality for common file types. You can now process a broad range of file types covering more formats out-of-the-box than what is possible with previous versions of Experience Manager. For example, thumbnail extraction of PSD and PSB formats is now possible that previously required third-party solutions such as ImageMagick. You cannot use the complex configurations of ImageMagick for the Processing Profiles configuration. Use Dynamic Media for advanced FFmpeg transcoding of videos and use processing profiles for basic transcoding of MP4 videos.

Asset microservices is a cloud-native service that is automatically provisioned and wired to Experience Manager in customer programs and environments managed in Cloud Manager. To extend or customize Experience Manager, developers can use existing content or assets with renditions generated in a cloud environment. This ability lets them test and validate their code by using, displaying, or downloading assets.

To do an end-to-end validation of the code and process including asset ingestion and processing, deploy the code changes to a cloud-dev environment using the pipeline and test with full execution of asset microservices processing.