It was a loooong time ago when I was the last time at the AdaptTo conference. For me, as an AEM Lead Developer, it is important to follow the trends and keep eye at the news in the Adobe Experience Manager world. Last years were very intensive, with new less revolutionary things like introducing AEM as a Cloud Service and more revolutionary things like Edge Delivery Service. 

When I looked at the list of topics to be presented at the AdaptTo 2024 conference, I knew it's the proper moment to buy a train ticket to Berlin and join this unique event. It was a perfect decision.

Edge Delivery Service (formerly known as Franklin or Helix projects) is a newest Adobe child on the CMS market. It is revolutionary as authoring is done in documents like Google Docs/MS Docs with flavour of the FE development (Vanilla JS + CSS). Sites created with this technology are fast and time to market is quick. You can read more about it our other article:

https://www.ds.pl/blog/can-document-based-authoring-speed-up-site-implementation.html 

Almost ⅓ of all topics were about Edge Delivery Services, which shows how much effort Adobe has invested in this product. One of the most significant presentation was about migration of all the sites within adobe.com domain from “classic” AEM to

EDS, which means ~1.5mln pages over dozens markets and languages. It was shown as a big success, but under the hood there are custom implementations, like a known from AEM Multi Site Management + translations functionality, which does not-exist in EDS at this moment. It is hard to predict if and when they will be a part of EDS.

Nevertheless having the adobe.com at Edge Delivery Service gives Adobe a heavy argument in convincing their big customers, with millions of pages, to go in the same way. At a discussion panel with Adobe engineers they were convincing the audience that sky is the limit and this technology is not only for small, brochureware sites.

AI is a buzzword recently and looks like it will still be in the future. I had a chance to see a fully working setup where GenAI tools including WatsonX and Firefly were rendering text and images for personalised pages. Pages are used then for SMS and email campaigns run in Edge Delivery Services, presented by IBM iX. 

From a technical point of view It worked really well, including the approval process by content managers, but… it was rendering not only generic descriptions/articles of product (at a demo, an example product was a shoes for runners), but also images of people using them and a product technical description. It was way too much. All pages looked so artificial and dummy, which would more convince me to quit than buy. I wonder how quick plugins will appear for the browsers, to filter out such content, similar adblockers filtering the ads. 

Much more promising in my opinion was a Composum AI - open source content creation integration for AEM created by Hans-Peter Stör. It supports LLM models, especially ChatGPT and allows to not only create content in multiple ways, but also translate it in a quick way. Looks much simpler and promising than AEM Translations. This is the feature, which I’m going to try when I have time, as it looks promising. You can read more about it at https://ai.composum.com/ 

Irrespective of EDS, the Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service with Cloud Manager are also rapidly developed. One of the newest features presented by Adobe is a configurable CDN, which is an integral part of the AEMaaCS setup. Naturally requests can be modified in the dispatcher, but doing that in CDN is more performant and secure. Bonus is that it can be reused in EDS (where dispatcher does not exist). What is allowed now?

• Request/response transformations

• Client-side redirects

• Traffic Fiter Rules

• Purge CDN cache

• Origin selectors

• Proxy to EDS

• Basic Authentication

CDN configuration is kept in the codebase, but deployed separately from the AEM deployment pipelines, so can be updated independently from release cycles. A year ago there was no option to change anything in the default CDN, so this is a huge step forward. 

Another interesting use case was a real-life example of using AEMaaCS in a working Continuous Deployment (up to 10, to production per day!) presented by Oskar Jerzyk and Tomasz Sobczyk from VML. System architecture is quite unique as it is event-driven, built of AEM being as a content source + authoring layer (fullstack + FE) and AWS as an APIs and processing layer. 

Continuous deployment is achieved by:

• stable sanity, Percy.io and regression tests run by developer

• minimise changes in fullstack (long to deploy) and maximise frontend changes (quick to deploy) 

• automatization as many processes as possible: content sync, dev deployments, scripts running, test running, release notes creation and more

  Architecture looks very complex, but as I talked with Tomasz, it took the VML a bit over a month to create a MVP, which is an impressive result.

There was a joke in the air that the conference should be renamed from AdaptTo to Document.querySelector, but whatever AEM engineers think about EDS, it is here and will become more and more significant on the market. Most probably by the cost of reducing “classic” AEM usage next years. It was really worth being a part of the AdaptTo audience be able to not only see the presentation live, but also ask questions and talk with the speakers during the coffee breaks.