Edge profiles

Last update: May 28, 2024

CREATED FOR:

  • User

In Adobe Experience Platform, Real-Time Customer Profile is the single source of truth for entity data. This profile data sits in a central hub, and caters to use cases that rely on the comprehensiveness and completeness of your data. However, in more real-time use cases, where time sensitivity is more important, edge profiles are the preferred option. Edge profiles are lightweight profiles that sit on edges and help in real-time personalization use cases.

For example, Adobe applications such as Adobe Target, Custom Personalization Destination, and Adobe Campaign use edges in order to provide personalized customer experiences in real-time. Data is routed to an edge by a projection, with a projection destination defining the edge to which data will be sent.

Terminology

When working with edges, make sure to understand the following concepts:

  • Edge: An edge is a geographically placed server that stores data and makes it readily accessible to applications.
  • Edge projection: An edge projection is the system projection view of profile on a specific edge to represent profile data with a unique ID conforming to a given schema for a given customer. For example, an entity respecting the Profile schema with ID CJsDEAMaEAHmCKwPCQYNvzxD9JGDHZ8, visitor of the Luma website, replicated to the VA6 data center, containing the fields age = 35 and gender = male.

In other terms, data is routed to an edge by a projection, with the projection destination defining which edge the data will be sent to.

Available regions

The following regions are available for usage with edge:

  • VA6
  • OR2
  • IRL1
  • AUS3
  • SGP3
  • JPN3
  • IND1

All of these regions are valid options for profiles to land in.

Available services

The following services are enabled for Profile lookup on edge:

Projection Worker Service

The Projection Worker Service (MEPW) monitors changes happening on the hub on profiles. After examining the changes in the configurations, this service prepares the projections and sends them out to the previously specified edge regions. Additionally, this service processes the entity refresh requests and sends out the required projections to the necessary regions. Entity refreshes are used to ensure the entity can be accessed with high availability.

Express Profile Service

The Express Profile Service (XPS) retrieves the profiles on the different edges. This service receives requests from downstream solutions, such as Adobe Target or Custom Personalization destinations, and looks up the profiles from the databases on the edges, and sends the requested profile to the requesting solution. If the profile isn’t found, a refresh request is send to the associated hub.

Next steps

After reading this guide, you should have a basic understanding of edge profiles, including information on the available regions and services for edge profiles. For more information on Adobe Experience Edge, please read the Edge Network overview.