Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Cloud Service brings many new features and possibilities for managing your AEM Projects. However, there are some differences between AEM Sites on premise or in Adobe Managed Service as compared to AEM Cloud Service. This document highlights the important differences.
This document highlights the notable changes to AEM as a whole. For more information and solution-specific changes see:
The main differences are found in the following areas:
Any content and subfolders in /apps
and /libs
is read-only. Any feature or custom code that expects to make changes there fails to do so. An error is returned that such content is read-only and the write operation was not able to complete. This has an impact in several areas of AEM:
/libs
are allowed at all.
/libs
that can be overlaid are still permitted within /apps
.
/apps
can’t be edited by way of the UI.
Changes to OSGi bundles and configurations must be introduced by way of the CI/CD pipeline.
The Web Console, used in previous versions of AEM to change OSGi bundles and configurations, is not available in AEM Cloud Service.
Aside from changes under the /home
folder on the publish tier, direct changes to the publish repository are not allowed on AEM Cloud Service. In prior versions of on-premise AEM or AEM on AMS, code changes could be made directly to the publish repository. Some limitations can be mitigated in the following ways:
Additional or custom run modes are not possible in AEM Cloud Service. For a list of run modes that are provided out-of-the-box for AEM Cloud Service, see Deploying to AEM as a Cloud Service.
In AEM Cloud Service, content is published using Sling Content Distribution. The replication agents used in previous versions of AEM are no longer used or provided, which might impact the following areas of existing AEM Projects:
In addition, the pause and disable buttons are removed from the replication agent administration console.
The Classic UI is no longer available in AEM Cloud Service.
HTTP acceleration including CDN and traffic management for Author and Publish services are provided by default in AEM Cloud Service.
For projects transitioning from AMS or an on-premises installation, Adobe strongly recommends using the built-in CDN, because features within AEM Cloud Service are optimized for the CDN provided.
Asset upload, processing, and download are optimized in Experience Manager Assets as a Cloud Service. AEM Assets is now more efficient, enables more scaling, and lets you upload and download at a faster rate. Also, it impacts the existing custom code and some operations. For a list of changes and for parity with Experience Manager 6.5 features, see the changes to Assets.