Migrating to AEM in the Cloud: Best Practices and Considerations

5 min readFeb 1, 2024

Do you know you can use AEM as a cloud? Recently, Adobe has announced its latest offering that will allow customers to put all their data on a native cloud rather than outsourcing them. It will give you a fast, scalable, and personalized experience. Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive web-based CMS developed by Adobe. It allows organizations and businesses to create, manage, and optimize digital customer and user experiences (UX) across various channels, including websites, mobile apps, and forms.

Now, you can utilize Cloud Manager for scalable DevOps efforts with features like CI/CD framework, autoscaling, API connectivity, flexible deployment modes, code quality gates, service delivery transparency, and guided updates. Moreover, the tools provided by AEM as a Cloud Service can accelerate migration tasks, including code refactoring, content transfer, and more.

So, AEM Cloud can help your team increase their productivity. Also, there are several benefits of migrating to AEM as a cloud service that you should be looking at.

Benefits of AEM as a Cloud Service

Always on with no downtime
Integration with Adobe IMS
automatically scales up and down based on needs
AEM applications always stay updated
Keeps evolving with constant reviews
Legacy replication replaced with Apache Sling: Content Distribution
Cloud manager-based CI/CD management
Preview instance before publishing
Content Repository Service with Node and Datastore
built-in Content Delivery Network (CDN) for fast content delivery
Automation of application development & testing process

Best Practices & Considerations while Migrating to AEM as a Cloud Service

The process of moving the AEM platform to AEM as a Cloud Service SaaS platform is not so complicated. All you need to do is pass down all three phases: Planning, Execution, and Get Live. The planning phase focuses on the readiness of your current cloud service architecture.

Once you are all set up, you can on-board the migration process. Develop a clear migration strategy that outlines the steps involved in moving from your current AEM setup to the cloud service. In the end, you can “Go Live.” But still, things continue, and you have to keep monitoring for issues and improve performance.

Make sure that you are familiar with everything about AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) and the changes or deprecated features against your current AEM source code. It will help you to analyze the areas requiring refactoring.

But before all that, you have to look over some practices and considerations while migrating to AEM as a Cloud:

Multi-region support is available but requires an additional add-on.
Binary storage is shared across servers, and additional storage can be enabled at an extra cost.
Address compatibility issues using the Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) report.
Ensure Cloud Manager quality requirements are met, including security, reliability, maintainability, and code coverage.
Consider changes needed for Dispatcher/CDN configurations.
Adapt to AEM as a Cloud restriction, e.g., no custom run modes, deployment through code, and using Cloud Manager CI/CD pipelines.
Create the KPIs, timelines, budget, and criteria for your project’s success. Once you are done with your setup and planned all the resources, it’s time to implement or execute the process.
You must need all required and additional environments (stage, production, development, and RDE) and 1 code quality pipeline for all environments.
Develop a cutover plan/strategy addressing code freeze, content freeze, content/asset migration, and delta content migration.
Update Classic UI to Touch UI and address changes related to the removal of Classic UI dialog support.
Avoid using the instance’s file system to store the application state.
Handle background tasks and long-running jobs appropriately, considering instances may be brought down at any time.
Custom Oak Index Definitions should be converted to AEM as Cloud Service-compatible definitions.
Enable CIF connector add-on through Cloud Manager if needed.
Use the Content Transfer Tool to migrate content from current AEM versions to AEM as a cloud.
Plan for SSL certificates, firewall, network changes, and DNS changes, and manage the current platform during migration.
Developers should use Cloud SDK for local development and testing.
Consider different types of testing, including functional, regression, performance, security, SEO, accessibility, and redirects.
The New Relic Application, Performance Monitoring suite, is recommended for real-time performance data, and logs can be forwarded to a customer’s Splunk account.
Organizations can choose between a “Lift & Shift” approach for minimal changes and a “Reimplementation” approach for rebuilding functionalities based on AEM as a Cloud best practice.

Changes In Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) as a Cloud Service

Immutable /apps and /libs at runtime:

Content and subfolders in /apps and /libs are read-only.
Changes in /libs are not allowed at all.
Overlays for areas in /libs are permitted within /apps, but they must come from Git via the CI/CD pipeline.
Static Template design information in /apps can’t be edited through the UI; it is recommended to use Editable Templates.

OSGi bundles and configurations will act as code
No changes to the publish repository
Additional or custom run modes are not possible in AEM Cloud Service.
Removal of Replication Agents
The Classic UI is no longer available in AEM Cloud Service.
HTTP acceleration is provided by default.
Adobe recommends using the built-in CDN for projects transitioning from AMS to on-premises installations.
Asset upload, processing, and download are optimized in AEM Assets as a Cloud Service.
AEM Assets is more efficient and scalable and allows faster upload and download rates.

Security for AEM as a Cloud Service

The security model of AEM as a Cloud Service includes tenant and node-level isolation, which means every cloud will exist in its isolated namespace. It will also include your own networking policies, computing system, and storage.

AEMaaCS uses encrypted connections using TLS 1.2 and above, so the connection can be highly secure. It also has a FIPS-approved crypto library and support for encryption keys to crypt all the critical data present in the cloud repository.

The authentication of AEMaaCS needs a username and a password. They can access their cloud via different types of user-named licensing like Business ID, Enterprise ID, and Federated ID.

Bottom Line

If you are thinking of moving your cloud to the AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS), it’s the best you can do. Also, the hosting service of AEM as a Cloud Service is present in global locations, including the US (Oregon, Virginia, Canada, Europe (London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt), Australia, Japan, and Singapore. So, your data would not only be secured in the best data centers after migrating to AEM but also give you fast content delivery with no downtime.

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