Migration Guide to Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service for Partners

Last update: October 22, 2024

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Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service offers an updated architecture for Experience Manager. This foundation is built upon a container-based infrastructure, API-driven development, and guided DevOps process. This allows marketers and developers to stay ahead of the curve in customer experience management innovations.

Cloud Service brings together rich out-of-the-box capabilities and extensibility of Adobe Experience Manager with the agility of the modern cloud-native architecture, enabling brands to meet the ever-evolving consumer demand.

This page outlines the phased approach recommended to transition customers from previous Experience Manager deployments to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service. The new, purpose-built platform helps you deliver connected, continuous experiences.

See the diagram below for a general representation of the migration journey.

General representation of the migration journey

Getting Started with Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service

What’s different?Architecture Overview

AEM as a Cloud Service - Runtime Architecture

Developer Journey in Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service

Developing

The fundamentals of code development in Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service are similar to those in the Adobe Experience Manager On Premise and Managed Services solutions.

Developers write code and test it locally, then push it to remote Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service environments.

See self-help resources about implementation for Experience Manager as a Cloud Service to learn how to customize your Experience Manager as a Cloud Service deployment.

Local Development SetupThings to know before you start
  1. Review Adobe Experience Manager SDK documentation to learn more.
  2. Watch Install Dispatcher SDK to understand how to install Dispatcher SDK
  3. Watch Configure Dispatcher SDK to understand on how to configure Dispatcher SDK
  4. Review Local Development Setup documentation to learn more
  5. Configuring access to Experience Manager walk-through
  1. Development Essentials
  2. Development Guidelines
  3. Understanding Experience Manager Project Structure
  4. Core Components
  5. Digital Foundation Blueprint
  6. Style System
  7. Overlays
  8. Experience Manager as a Cloud Service API reference
TIP

Deploying

Developers write code and test it locally, then push it to remote AEM as a Cloud Service environments.

Cloud Manager, which was an optional content delivery tool for Managed Services, is now required. It is the sole mechanism for deploying code to AEM as a Cloud Service environments.

See self-help resources about how to configure and deploy to AEM as a Cloud Service environments.

TIP

Help and Resources

  1. Debugging tips and tricks

  2. Developer Console

  3. CRXDE Lite (Only available on local SDK and Experience Manager Cloud Dev environments)

  4. Logs and logging

    • CM Logs (build-unit-testing, code-scanning, build-image, deploy)
    • Experience Manager Cloud Service Logs (aemerror, aemaccess, aemrequest, aemdispatcher, httpderror, httpaccess)
    • Local SDK Logs (under host:port/crx-quickstart/logs)
NOTE
For additional help, you may want to :

Moving to Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service

Experience Manager as a Cloud Service provides a scalable, secure, and agile technology foundation for Experience Manager Sites and Assets, enabling marketers and IT to focus on delivering impactful experiences at scale.

With Experience Manager as a Cloud Service, your teams can focus on innovating instead of planning for product upgrades. New product features are thoroughly tested and delivered to your teams without any interruption so that they always have access to the state-of-the-art application.

The transition journey to Cloud Service involves three phases - Planning, Execution, and Post Go-live.
For a successful and smooth transition, you should ensure proper planning and adhere to best practices outlined in this Guide.

The figure below shows a high-level representation of the recommended transition journey to Cloud Service.

High-level representation of the recommended transition journey to Cloud Service

Planning

Before beginning your transition journey to Cloud Service, you should:

  • familiarize yourself with Experience Manager as a Cloud Service
  • review the notable changes that have been made to it
  • review the features that have been replaced or deprecated
Project discovery and assessment
  • See Notable Changes to Experience Manager as a Cloud Service to understand the important differences between Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service and Experience Manager 6.x.
  • See Deprecated Features to learn more about features and capabilities that have been marked as deprecated.
  • [For Cloud Service Migrations only] Assessing Cloud Service Readiness : Run the Best Practices Analyzer(BPA) on source environment
  • Complete an assessment against notable changes and deprecated features in Experience Manager CS
Review
  • Based on discovery, perform effort estimation and resourcing exercises
Measure
NOTE
The Best Practices Analyzer Report speeds up the process of estimating the time and cost that is required to transition to AEM as a Cloud Service by providing information that would otherwise have to be manually gathered and evaluated.

Execution

Before you start the Execution phase of a project, you should be on-boarded to Cloud Service. You also need to familiarize yourself with Cloud Manager. This is the mechanism for deploying project code to an Experience Manager Cloud Service instance.

Cloud Manager enables organizations to self-manage Experience Manager in the Cloud. It includes a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) framework that lets IT teams and implementation partners expedite the delivery of customizations or updates without compromising performance or security.

Content Migration

  1. Content Transfer Tool : used to move existing content over from a source AEM instance (on-premise or AMS) to the target AEM Cloud Service instance.
  2. Package Manager : used for importing and exporting of mutable content of the repository.

Refactor/Optimize

Getting StartedReview & Refactor CodeDispatcher Review
TIP
Assets Customers : Review & Refactor Assets Workflows using Asset Cloud Migration tooling

Deployment/Go-Live

  1. Deploy to Cloud Manager git
  2. Run customer code through the Cloud Manager Quality Pipeline
  3. Deploy to Development Environment
  4. [Migration only] Content transfer using packages or Content Transfer Tool(CTT)
  5. Perform recommended testing cycles (smoke, QA and more)
  6. Promote to the Cloud Manager Production Pipeline
  7. Smoke test validation
  8. Go-Live

Post Go-Live

In the Post Go-live phase, you should ensure clean-up of temporary files, review best practices for continuous development and manage logs.

TIP
Tools are available to troubleshoot AEM as a Cloud Service environment

Tools & Resources

AssessmentRefactoringExperience Manager ModernizationContent Migration
NOTE
For additional help, you may want to :

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