Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network Server API overview

Hey everybody. My name is Mitch. I am the Product Manager for the Adobe Experience Platform Edge Network Server API. So the Platform Edge Network provides customers the ability to interact with the Adobe Experience Platform and the applications that are built on it, like Customer Journey Analytics offer decisioning and edge segmentation. Additionally, the Platform Edge Network allows customers to interact with Experience Cloud solutions such as Adobe Analytics, Target and Audience Manager.

As you probably know, we’ve provided access to the Adobe Experience Platform Engine Network by the AEP Web SDK and the AEP Mobile SDK for quite some time now. Today, we’re excited to announce that customers can now interact with the Platform Edge Network using a Server API as well.

So the Server API is going to open the door for a variety of new data collection use cases for our customers. The Server API allows customers to interact with the Platform Edge Network using several new device categories including servers, IOT devices and set top boxes among many other device types.

In addition to support for these new device categories, the Server API now also supports interacting with the Platform Edge Network using authenticated data streams.

This will allow our customers in the healthcare and financial services industries to interact with the Platform Edge Network in a secure manner that will ensure that user data is transported and written to platforms securely. Finally, the Server API opens the door for customers to interact with the Platform Edge Network using a fast and flexible server to server connection. As an increasing percentage of internet traffic takes place on mobile connections, use of a server to Server API will ensure that communication between Adobe and its customers happens on stable and fast server connections. This means more consistent data collection and more consistent personalization for our customers.

Let’s take a closer look at each one of these items. From a security perspective, support for the Server API includes a new API endpoint that which only accepts secure traffic. This endpoint was created specifically for the server to Server API use case.

All traffic sent to this endpoint must be authenticated by tokens obtained via the Adobe Developer Console. These tokens are rotated every 24 hours for additional security.

Any request to this endpoint that don’t contain the appropriate credentials will be dropped as they arrive at the edge.

In addition to support for authentication, the edge network also supports and includes a new feature. It allows for data streams and their corresponding platform data sets to be set to accept only authenticated traffic. So for customers who have sensitive data, this provides yet another layer of security to ensure that their data is protected. One of the thing that we’ve noticed as we’ve had conversations with customers is that they want the flexibility to send their data to the edge network in a variety of different ways. This includes sending data using a variety of methods for the same site or application. We’ve started referring to these sorts of implementations as hybrid implementations. What this means for most customers is that depending on their use case, they can now leverage both, the Server API and the Web SDK together. In the past, this sort of implementation would’ve been a pretty significant challenge due to the differences in how visitors were identified across different SDKs and APIs. However, the Server API, along with a recently released first party device ID feature make visitor identification across multiple SDKs and APIs easier than it’s ever been. Additionally, the Web and Mobile SDKs, as well as the Server API all support the XDM and JSON based data layers. So for developers, this will ensure a more consistent development experience as they instrument across a variety of different platforms. So both, the AEP Mobile SDK and the AEP Web SDK were developed with speed in mind. Each one is significantly lighter and faster than their predecessor. However, increasingly customers are asking for data collection solutions that don’t utilize any SDKs. In these situations, the Server API is a perfect solution and can provide an even faster way to interact with the Platform Edge Network. Using SDKs, customers must wait for the SDK to load before they can start making any requests to the edge network. However when an API is used, there is no library, which means that customers can start interacting with the edge network as soon as the page starts to load. In addition to providing end users better site experience, page load times have a direct impact on SEO scores. So in short, the Server API can help customers facilitate faster page load times, improve customer experiences, as well as improve SEO at performance. This feature should be available for just about every Adobe customer. In terms of UI updates, we’ll be rolling out some minor changes to datastreams UI that will allow customers to create authenticated only datastreams. So we’re really excited about this feature and look forward to making sure that the survey API is yet another great way for customers to interact with the Platform Edge Network and the solutions that we’ve built on top of it. -