Will There Actually be an AEM 6.6 After All?
When AEM as a Cloud Service first launched in 2020, all of us (and every Adobe Engineering individual I’ve talked to) has been convinced that AEM 6.5 would be the last on-premise or self-hosted AEM version. But times MIGHT just change. Give this a watch:
We’ll obviously have more details after the end of October when the aforementioned “AEM 6.5 and JDK 17” talk happens at AdaptTo(), but presuming this comes to pass it’s HIGHLY likely that there will be a new version of AEM in the wild.
Because, as the brief says, there will be some deprecated APIs and features that can’t make it to AEM 6.5-on-JDK17 version, this means that there will be a preparation and migration project for anyone who is still on 6.5 when this comes out.
Some companies may be able to do this migration relatively painlessly and immediately, if they’re not impacted by the JDK 17 deprecations. However, as there WILL be a runway for those that can’t immediately migrate (and definitely more than the 90-day service pack release cycle) this means that there will very likely end up being two separate service pack builds - one for JDK8/11, and one for JDK17. Keeping track of that (as well as support) will make it highly likely that Adobe will want to just increment the version.
There is SO MUCH that has changed between AEM 6.5.0 and 6.5.21, that a roll-up version update could already just as well be called AEM 6.6, so we’ll have to wait and see!
Just one more reason to attend AdaptTo() this year!
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Tad Reeves
Principal Architect at Arbory Digital
AEM Architect & DevOps guy with 14 years experience on AEM/CQ and 25+ years in systems infrastructure. He’s been mountain biking longer than he’s been doing system administration, and though originally from Maine, makes his home in the mountains of Northwest Georgia.
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