AEM as a cloud Service and AEM Franklin - Article 1 - My Perspective on the AEM evolution and choices in front us

Website is the primary important vehicle for the brands to communicate with their customers. The importance has grown over the years and brands are using this channel to educate, engage and convert the customers to use their products/services as they are heavily invested in this medium.

Here are some sample statistics? (Top Website Statistics for 2023 – Forbes Advisor )? to show the growing importance of the web channel(hence the web sites) ?and the rise in user expectations while conversing through this medium

§? 47% of users won’t wait longer than two seconds for a website to load

§? Websites that load slowly cost retailers $2.6 billion U.S. dollars in sales each year

§? Website users spend 57% of their time above the fold

§? 40% of users will leave a site if take more than three seconds to load

§? 88% of online users won’t return to a site after a bad experience

§? Users are 67% more likely to make a purchase if the website is mobile-friendly

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We have seen the evolution of the Web Content Management systems from the early 2000 till date trying to solve different problems at different juncture during their times. I can think of few top ones that came to mind while writing this article

1)????? ease with you can aggregate information from different information sources and display it to the end user aka customers (Remember Vignette WCMS and portlet-based world !!!),

2)????? ease of authoring, preview, and publishing (Vignette form-based authoring and display v/s Adobe CQ page-based authoring),

3)????? separation of concerns (CMS + Delivery systems), &

4)????? on prem infrastructure to host these systems (database backed CMS systems with authoring/publish server along with caching mechanism v/s hierarchical storage systems like Adobe CQ with authoring/publish farms along with caching mechanism).

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Since this article focusses primarily on AEM CMS and its evolution with the recent AEM Franklin announcement from Adobe, let us understand what has forced Adobe to revamp or adjust its CMS solution offerings.

We came a long way since AEM CQ world solving different kinds of problems with major theme being “in context page editing, authoring, preview and publishing” to ease the content marketers / publisher community problem of not relying on IT to author the content and publish the pages at ease. At the same time, developer community got introduced to the “component” driven front end technology and the OSGi service-based model replicating a kind of microservices development/deployment from a sense of separation from this headful monolith of web content management services.

The evolution of the AEM CMS till date is still revolving around the above 4 core concepts(ease of authoring, ease of composability to aggregate and deliver content, separation of concerns, web content infrastructure to host several critical services to support the modern web site needs)? ?stated above, which has taken a different shape with the recent advancement in the cloud SaaS model, front end frameworks revolution, edge delivery, DevOps advancement and ever demanding omni channel content delivery needs.

There are several industry trends that has forced changes in the way the AEM CMS platform architected/rearchitected & operationalized for the betterment of both the business user and developers’ community.

?Critical market forces, industry and technology trends that have reshaped the way the modern web platforms like AEM are forced to adopt to the situations to meet the demands are stated below

?Trend 1 – Cloud SaaS Product delivery model

Cloud native application architecture with always being current, auto scalable with performant delivering innovation and reduced cost of operations

?Trend 2 – Rise of frontend cloud

Redefining web development for the modern enterprise

·???????? Improved user experience and customer satisfaction?

·???????? Lower infrastructure and maintenance costs?

·???????? Improved learning and onboarding

?Trend 3 - Thinking Core Web Vitals

·???????? Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal ?

?Trend 4 – Innovative Frontend Frameworks and Architectural Patters

Micro frontends, Server-side rendering, Headless and Hybrid patterns, Component-driven development, Composable Applications, GraphQL, Progressive web applications, WebAssembly, Web Components, JAMstack

Adobe was responding to the market forces to address many of the trends coming from competitors (Vercel’s of the world, Contentful and Contentstack’s of the world), clients (ease of authoring, workflows, and publishing, development, and operational ease) and technology trends (headless, micro frontends etc..) which is reshaping the way the entire modern web infrastructure and services that needs to be rebuilt to address these challenges.

The other challenge that Adobe AEM was forced to address was performance first thinking of development/deployment which was difficult to implement due to complexities at various levels starting from development, deployment, and testing lifecycles.

Enforcement on the reusability of architecture standards & design pattern, framework standardization, code development, testing methodology was another factor which was in the critical path of the web site development and maintenance.

Operating and customizing current applications required AEM CMS specific Frontend framework expertise.

Added to that the demand from “omni channel” and “personalized” delivery and management of the content was pushing the AEM system to be on path of innovation to meet the marketers and content world demands.

The need to deliver the content at scale was very important more than ever with the raise in the number of channels for the user to consume the content at their channel of choice, with importance to speed of delivery, relevancy, and accuracy.

The above forces, & trends has given rise to several iterations of AEM with several “avatars” to address ever changing web site /application / delivery landscape.

I wanted to simplify the things by showing its progression at a high level showing its evolution to meet the market demands

§? AEM headful (Generation 1) on prem

§? AEM headful, headless and hybrid (Generation 2) on cloud

§? AEM Franklin aka AEM edge delivery services (Generation 3)

?Generation 1 AEM headful is all about self-serve, monolith, page-based authoring with CMS core services blended with proprietary component-based frontend framework to boost developer productivity hosted on prem.

?Generation 2 AEM has started bringing significant changes into its fold to meet ever changing enterprise needs and from the competitor / industry / tech trend waves

§? Cloud based model to deliver product innovation with speed & agility to address SaaS based needs

§? Bringing headless, & hybrid model of delivering content to multiple channels including websites

§? Open-source web components

§? Single Page Application (SPA) with SPA editor integrated due to market force making Adobe to bring the framework into its front ending fold to give choice and flexibility

§? API first approach (HTTP REST content API’s , JSON payloads using GraphQL API etc…)

§? Style systems, editable templates, content fragments, & experience fragments

§? Content fragment editor, SPA editor

?Generation 3 AEM has started bringing more rapid changes into its fold with the branding under “AEM Franklin” aka “Edge Delivery Services”. The motto behind this release is due to the forces making the way the web management and delivery needs to be perceived through the eyes of

§? Ease of authoring using native document applications like Word, Excel, and Google Docs: - The purpose is to handle the power to the content authors without tying to a specific structured format by the “developer” community who have built the “structure” in “isolation” thinking that it would ease out the way authors perceive and author the content.

§? Simplified “component” based system through “Section” & “Block” constructs

§? Performant delivery: - With the rise of frontend clouds promising scalability, real time insights and control for site deployment about the performance, Adobe was forced to packaging the services along with bring your own CDN model (BYOCDN)

§? Omni Channel Content Management & Headless Delivery: - Headless push from many emerging CMS vendors like Contentful, ContentStack etc… forced Adobe to enhance its CMS architecture to be more flexible in nature. Rise of omni channel content syndication has also given way to the model of “omni channel content platform” as opposed to simply a “web” content management & deliver system

§? BYOFE (Bring your own frontend) - Modern day frameworks like React, Vue, Next JS and Angular bringing revolutionary way the web apps are architected and built to deliver modern rich interactive applications. This has forced Adobe to not to enforce the front end technology (either proprietary or React only) but rather allow developer community to bring the front end of their choice in line with their organization standards and future direction

§? Personalization at the edge: Deliver dynamic, personalized content, to see the best version of the site.

?AEM Franklin with its next gen set of composability is aiming at easing some of the pain points for the authors in terms of rigid structured content development and page aggregation models by giving them full power to work in their favorite “document-based editors”.? The content authoring will be fluid using the natural way the document flows along with “table” based structures to formulate “block” level components for rendering the content along with the rich experience delivery format by the developers.

?Here are some highlights from the release.

§ Simplified authoring with document-based editors

§ Next-gen content composition model

§ Front-end performance optimizations

§ Headless and omnichannel content delivery

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?With this Adobe AEM as a cloud Service has much more powerful and flexible web infrastructure offerings to that of its competitors containing Generation 2 + Generation 3 capabilities. Here are some of the possible architectural combinations that you can use with this platform to develop and deploy your web application of choice.

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AEM on prem & AEM as a cloud service

1)????? AEM headful

§? AEM headful with sidekick

§? AEM headful with upcoming Universal editor

§? AEM headful with React SPA editor (I feel mostly this will be deprecated in favor of the universal editor in future)

2)????? AEM headless

§? AEM headless with React, Angular, or Vue or any other front-end combination with upcoming Universal Editor combination

§? AEM headful & headless (Hybrid) with upcoming Universal Editor combination

3) AEM Franklin aka Edge Delivery Services

§? AEM next gen composition (Franklin) services with document-based authoring and vanilla CSS, JS, and HTML combination for Front end development

§? AEM next gen composition (Franklin) services and vanilla CSS, JS, and HTML combination for frontend in conjunction with Universal Editor

§? AEM next gen composition (Franklin) services with document-based authoring and Next JS, React, Angular, or Vue as FE in conjunction with Universal Editor

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I will be continuing to refine and expand my thoughts in my next article giving more details on the best selection path for website development and maintenance using either the AEM as a cloud service or AEM Franklin aka Edge Delivery Services or a combination of the above based on the use case at hand

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