Is Self-Hosted AEM Still a Thing? - Revisited in Today’s Edge Delivery World
Today’s marketing technology world is a strange one, even without all the noise around generative AI. There’s a whole counterculture around “cloud repatriation” - of moving core business infrastructure back to company-owned facilities rather than 3rd-party public clouds. But at the same time, there are shockingly good services like Adobe’s new Edge Delivery Service, as well as frequent upgrades and updates to Adobe’s Experience Manager Cloud Service solution stack, that makes the landscape all the more challenging to decipher.
So with that, it’s time to once again post the question: Is self-hosted AEM still a thing?
We’re soon going to be doing a second iteration of asking that question live, and would like to bring in as many OPINIONATED folks as possible to answer.
Here are some points for you to consider:
- What technology problems are still best-served by a self-hosted AEM solution?
- When are the right times to confront politically-difficult IT moves that are required with a full cloud or Edge Delivery migration?
- Does data residency affect your hosting decisions?
- How much has the availability of IT DevOps talent affected your decision to move on or off of a SaaS solution?
To further stoke your wits on this subject, here are a few recent & related podcasts we’ve done on the subject.
Is Self-Hosted AEM Still a Thing - with Joey Smith: our last-year tackle of this subject, before Edge Delivery was GA and while Helix was still operating below the radar and no sites had gone live with it:
The infrastructure-disruption Adobe Summit recap where several people reached out to me to ask if I was OK, or had been kidnapped & held against my will, due to my complete about-face on the subject of Edge Delivery.
This is all added to the fact that there are AMAZING new services that further complicate the mix, as they solve for a number of the problems that some cloud & on-prem hosting solutions suffer from.
Examples are the mind-boggling StreamX event streaming service which solves for many of the performance problems of serving dynamic content FAST in either an Edge Delivery or on-prem AEM secenario.
Or also think with Chinafy, which solves for a lot of the infrastructure issues which would cause one to have to deploy resources inside the borders of mainland China.
Want to chat about this on our podcast, or have questions about how this affects YOUR scenarios? Please reach out!
About the Author
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.
Like what you heard? Have questions about what’s right for you? We’d love to talk! Contact Us
Podcast Episodes & Blog Posts
Setting up Splunk on AEM as a Cloud Service
How do you set up log aggregation on AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS)? The only supported path for most users is to use Splunk, and this how-to walks you through the full Splunk setup on AEM.
The Crossroads of AEM Platform Choices - AEM 6.5 vs AEMaaCS vs EDS - Arbory Digital Podcast Ep5
Did you know that Adobe is presently selling & supporting 3 very-different CMS / Digital Experience Platforms? Which is best for you? Veteran AEM engineers Tad Reeves and Dwayne Hale discuss.
AEM in China: What if you’re targeting users in Mainland China?
Do you have a user base in Mainland China that you’d like to reach? Is AEM as a Cloud Service an option? What do you need to consider before making a move to reach in-China internet users?