AEM Sites and Edge Delivery Services sites-and-edge

Understand how Edge Delivery Services expands the authoring and publishing possibilities for AEM Sites in order to accelerate content creation and deliver sites with 100% performance.

Overview overview

In addition to all the power and features that AEM Sites as a Cloud Service provides as part of the cloud-native AEM as a Cloud Service platform, Edge Delivery Services offers additional authoring and publishing possibilities to accelerate content creation and deliver sites with 100% performance.

What are Edge Delivery Services? what-is-edge

Edge Delivery Services deliver exceptional experiences that drive engagement and conversions by delivering high-impact experiences that are fast to author and develop. It is a composable set of services that enables a rapid development environment where authors can update and publish quickly, and new sites are launched rapidly. Learn more about Edge Delivery Services in the document Edge Delivery Services Overview.

Using Edge Delivery Services along with AEM Sites as a Cloud Service, your projects can benefit from:

A New Developer Experience developer-experience

A core philosophy of Edge Delivery Services is velocity. This starts with the developer experience. If your developers:

They can get up-and-running customizing their own project and components for Edge Delivery Services in less than thirty minutes. Start by cloning our boilerplate project on GitHub and then just commit your changes. Your customization are instantly live!

Please see the document Getting Started - Developer Tutorial to learn more about developing for Edge Delivery Services.

A New Publish Tier publish-tier

Not only is development time dramatically reduced, but Edge Delivery Services also bring blazing-fast websites.

Additional Authoring Options authoring-options

Edge Delivery Services also increases your content creation velocity by offering new authoring options.

The Universal Editor universal-editor

The Universal Editor offers a seamless, what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) authoring experience that can be used to author any content.

Please see the document WYSIWYG Content Authoring for Edge Delivery Services to learn more about content authoring with the Universal Editor.

Document-Based Authoring document-authoring

Document-based authoring allows anyone to create content without any training by leveraging tools everyone knows: Word and Google Docs. Using these simple tools, Edge Delivery Services can instantly transform a change to a Word document to updated content on your live site.

Please see the document Authoring and Publishing Content to learn more about using document-based authoring.

Is Edge Right for You? decision

Adobe has seen its customers and their involved stakeholders benefit massively from Edge Delivery Services across projects of all sizes. For this reason, Adobe recommends leveraging Edge Delivery Services as the starting point for any new project.

It is also possible to deploy a subset of sites or pages on Edge Delivery while keeping the rest on the current stack. This is recommended whenever improvements in performance, organic traffic, customer engagement, developer, or content velocity is required.

Please reach out to your Adobe representative if you are not sure if Edge Delivery is right for you.

What About Edge Delivery and Headless? (#headless)

Edge Delivery is a performance-first head that is decoupled from the backend. If you have a custom head such as React SPA, Adobe recommends the AEM headless integration pattern. Please see the AEM headless documentation for more information.

However, Adobe generally recommends using Edge Delivery as the default head to benefit from its speed and performance and integrate the headless portion of the your project (usually the business application) via a headless approach (e.g. React or SPA).