Replication replication

Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service uses the Sling Content Distribution capability to move the content to replicate to a pipeline service run on Adobe Developer that is outside of the AEM runtime.

Methods of Publishing Content methods-of-publishing-content

Quick Un/Publish - Planned Un/Publish publish-unpublish

This feature lets you publish the selected pages immediately, without the additional options possible through the Manage Publication approach.

For more information, see Manage Publication.

On and Off Times - Trigger Configuration on-and-off-times-trigger-configuration

The additional possibilities of On Time and Off Time are available from the Basic tab of Page Properties.

To realize the automatic replication for this feature, enable Auto Replicate in the OSGi configuration On Off Trigger Configuration:

Manage Publication manage-publication

Manage Publication offers more options than Quick Publish, allowing for the inclusion of child pages, customization of the references, and starting any applicable workflows and offering the option to publish later.

Including a folder’s children for the “publish later” option invokes the Publish Content Tree workflow, described in Tree Replication Workflows.

You can find more detailed information on Manage Publication on the Publishing Fundamentals documentation.

To replicate deep content hierarchies in bulk, use a workflow-based approach. See Tree Replication Workflows for the recommended Tree Activation workflow step, configuration parameters, and monitoring guidance. The deprecated Publish Content Tree workflow is also documented there for reference.

Replication API replication-api

You can publish content using the Replication API featured in AEM as a Cloud Service.

For more information, see the API Documentation.

Basic Usage of the API

@Reference
Replicator replicator;
@Reference
ReplicationStatusProvider replicationStatusProvider;

....
Session session = ...
// Activate a single page to all agents, which are active by default
replicator.replicate(session,ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE,"/content/we-retail/en");
// Activate multiple pages (but try to limit it to approx 100 at max)
replicator.replicate(session,ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE, new String[]{"/content/we-retail/en","/content/we-retail/de"});

// ways to get the replication status
Resource enResource = resourceResolver.getResource("/content/we-retail/en");
Resource deResource = resourceResolver.getResource("/content/we-retail/de");
ReplicationStatus enStatus = enResource.adaptTo(ReplicationStatus.class);
// if you need to get the status for more than 1 resource at once, this approach is more performant
Map<String,ReplicationStatus> allStatus = replicationStatusProvider.getBatchReplicationStatus(enResource,deResource);

Replication Agents

AEM as a Cloud Service provides two predefined replication agents that route content from author to a target tier through Sling Content Distribution:

You can view and monitor both agents from Tools > Deployment > Distribution:

Selecting an agent card opens its status, logs, and queue details.

Replication with Specific Agents

When you replicate with the API as shown above, only agents that are enabled by default are used—in AEM as a Cloud Service, that is publish only. To replicate exclusively to the preview tier, pass an AgentFilter that selects the preview agent:

See the following example:

private static final String PREVIEW_AGENT = "preview";

ReplicationStatus beforeStatus = enResource.adaptTo(ReplicationStatus.class); // beforeStatus.isActivated == false

ReplicationOptions options = new ReplicationOptions();
options.setFilter(new AgentFilter() {
  @Override
  public boolean isIncluded (Agent agent) {
    return agent.getId().equals(PREVIEW_AGENT);
  }
});
// will replicate only to preview
replicator.replicate(session,ReplicationActionType.ACTIVATE,"/content/we-retail/en", options);

ReplicationStatus afterStatus = enResource.adaptTo(ReplicationStatus.class); // afterStatus.isActivated == false
ReplicationStatus previewStatus = afterStatus.getStatusForAgent(PREVIEW_AGENT); // previewStatus.isActivated == true

If you replicate without an AgentFilter, only publish is used and the preview tier is not affected.

The overall ReplicationStatus of a resource updates only when the replication includes at least one agent that is enabled by default. In the example above, only preview was used, so ReplicationStatus.isActivated remains false. Use getStatusForAgent() to check status for a specific agent—for example, getStatusForAgent("preview") after a preview-only replication, or getStatusForAgent("publish") for the live publish tier.

Methods of Invalidating Content invalidating-content

You can directly invalidate content by using either Sling Content Invalidation (SCD) from author (the preferred method) or by using the Replication API to invoke the publish Dispatcher flush replication agent. See Caching page for further details.

Replication API Capacity Limits

Replicate fewer than 100 paths at a time, with 500 being the limit. Above the limit, a ReplicationException is thrown.
If your application logic does not require atomic replication, this limit can be overcome by setting the ReplicationOptions.setUseAtomicCalls to false, which accepts any number of paths, but internally creates buckets to stay below this limit.

The size of the content transmitted per replication call must not exceed 10 MB. This rule includes the nodes and properties, but not any binaries (workflow packages and content packages are considered binaries).

Replication Queues replication-queues

Each replication agent displays two replication queues. AEM as a Cloud Service no longer shows a separate queue for each publish pod—the publish tier scales automatically, so per-pod queues added complexity without practical benefit. Queue status is consolidated as follows:

Monitor Replication Queues monitor-replication-queues

Troubleshooting troubleshooting

If content cannot be published, the publication is reverted from the AEM Publish Service. Use Monitor Replication Queues to open the agent Status tab and identify the affected queue.

When a queue shows a red status, review its pending items to find what caused the failure. Select the queue to view pending items, then clear individual items or the entire queue if needed.