Should You Trade Your Old AEM for The Cloud?

Practical tips on the migration of a lifetime.

It’s been four years since the release of AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS), and Adobe is delivering on promises of reducing time to market. It’s also improving just about everything else, from security and scalability to analytics—we’ve even heard rumors that it can make you an espresso that gives you 13.325% more energy. It’s no wonder that many industry leaders are ditching traditional self-hosted/on-premise or Adobe Managed Services configurations (“AEM Classic”) for a new and promising life in the Cloud.

If you’re now switching from another Digital Experience Platform to AEM, you’re likely going straight for the Cloud. If you’re still riding your trusty AEM Classic warhorse, the Cloud is a beautiful oasis far beyond a long desert.

This article will give you a few mile markers along that journey.

Time To Rethink Everything

AEMaaCS is a paradigm shift for companies using AEM. With AEM Classic, your website was built on a common platform with everybody else, but very much a one-of-a-kind product. For better or worse, your dev team had to constantly invent, even building their own architecture.

AEMaaCS turns your website into a customized configuration or custom interface of a common service. Your devs will adapt bits and pieces, adjust the platform itself, and massively reuse ready-made technologies.

This will probably require less time and effort and even save you money. But it’s definitely a shift in how you think about the platform, demanding new competencies and a new mode of work.

So Many Reasons to Switch

At the risk of sounding like a sales rep from Adobe, we’d like to point out that it’s usually less expensive to use AEM Cloud once you’ve got everything set up. Other things you’ll enjoy include:

So Many Reasons Not to Switch (Right Now)

Switching to the Cloud is no walk in the park. There are many legitimate reasons why some of our customers have decided to stay with AEM Classic.

Enough Preamble, Here’s the Checklist

See How ”Best” Your Practices Really Are

To get started, we recommend that our customers generate a Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) report offered by Adobe—these are free, by the way. This will clearly lay out the issues that need to be addressed before migrating to the Cloud. Mitigating these issues is a good step forward in AEM Classic, regardless of your Cloud plans, as you can immediately benefit from the security boost it provides.

Compile with an Archetype

All Cloud-ready projects need to comply with a modern build-up (the so-called “archetype”). These projects have to be able to be built with Java 11, follow the separation of mutable and immutable content, be free of obsolete dependencies and building plugins, and use best coding practices.

Altering the project’s structure poses the risk of “losing” an important feature or dependency, as well as letting a conflicting dependency slip in. To deal with this kind of issue, it is important to introduce changes in limited portions and establish regression testing. There are automation tools that help to trace changes in project artifacts (.jar or .zip files) as well as in rendered web pages so that you are able to stop and rewind if an unexpected change appears.

We made an open-source tool for this (EToolbox AnyDiff) specifically for AEM, and you’re welcome to use it, too.

At this point, we recommend consulting with Adobe’s list of “Deprecated and Removed Features and APIs”. If your project uses these kinds of features, you’ll need a plan for refactoring, or you might consider discontinuing some of them altogether. For example, you might be using a custom logging pattern that is not compatible with AEMaaCS. In that case, you may want to design a log forwarding scheme that involves services such as Splunk or Elasticsearch, and set up a sandbox for that before the actual migration.

Schedule the Switch to Cloud Manager

If you currently run an on-premise AEM installation with a custom deployment scheme, you’ll need to schedule a switch to Cloud Manager as an interim step before migrating to AEMaaCS. Cloud Manager, despite its name, is not yet a “full-scale” AEMaaCS installation—the coding framework remains the same, but the integration/deployment strategy changes.

Switching to Cloud Manager is your dress rehearsal for the Cloud, complete with a modern project structure and code quality standards.

The Tools for the Job

Most of our customers’ AEM projects contain three main parts: authoring tools, back-end implementation, and front-end implementation. These parts can be combined with different types of integrations.

All these parts should be tested and will likely need to be adjusted to the new AEMaaCS environment. That can be challenging, but using the right tools can significantly accelerate the process and make it safer.

Cloud Migration: A Great Excuse for Spring Cleaning

Rip off the band-aid or slow and steady wins the race—it doesn’t matter what strategic metaphor you use, you’re probably going to move to the Cloud at some point. Yes, it’s a lot of work. And yes, it’ll require a complete rethink of your site, your team, your tech, and your practice. But, the positive downstream effects are tremendous.

This major shake-up will permanently rid you of outdated code and content practices that you probably should have dealt with years ago. With the right planning, attention to the expertise of the AEM community, and best practices, you’ll be living your best AEM life in the Cloud before you know it.