Skip to main content
Suraj_Kamdi
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
Nov 19, 2019 6:35 AM UTC
Solved

What are the steps to integrate AEM with Akamai ?

I want to integrate AEM 6.5 with Akamai to handle replication and caching.

Is their any documentation for implementation of Akamai with AEM ?

This post is no longer active and is closed to new replies. Need help? Start a new post to ask your question.
joerghoh
joerghohAccepted solution
Adobe Employee
Nov 19, 2019 1:40 PM UTC

If you get your expiration headers right on AEM/dispatcher side, just configure Akamai to use your AEM instance as origin and configure it to acept the expiration dates provided by AEM.

Then you don't need to write any code which connects AEM with Akamai.

13 replies

joerghoh
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
Nov 19, 2019 1:21 PM UTC

There is no specific way how AEM should integrate.

Adobe Consulting typically recommends to use only TTL-based expiration, so there's no need to deal with active invalidation on Akamai side. That works quite well in most cases and delivers the expected benefit of Akmai.

Jörg

Translate
harryl53317155
Level 2
Mar 16, 2021 3:52 PM UTC
Hello, Can we talk about this again? Akamai has improved their system and cache can be purged within seconds by their API or console app. This has made the AEM integration with Akamai on cache purging more meaningful. Akamai should be configured to cache content with a long time period to improve page loading performance. AEM/Akamai is a such common setup for most of Adobe customers, I wonder why Adobe cannot have an out of box service component doing the integration.
Translate
Suraj_Kamdi
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
Nov 19, 2019 1:33 PM UTC

Yes, I agree with you but I need some steps to configure AEM with Akamai and sample service utility class code to understand how to connect AEM with Akamai.

Translate
Suraj Kamdi
joerghoh
Adobe Employee
joerghohAdobe EmployeeAccepted solution
Adobe Employee
Nov 19, 2019 1:40 PM UTC

If you get your expiration headers right on AEM/dispatcher side, just configure Akamai to use your AEM instance as origin and configure it to acept the expiration dates provided by AEM.

Then you don't need to write any code which connects AEM with Akamai.

Translate
Suraj_Kamdi
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
Nov 19, 2019 1:59 PM UTC

Ohh that's the point. Thanks Jorg for the quick reply.

Translate
Suraj Kamdi
ahmedmusallam
Level 2
Nov 19, 2019 2:10 PM UTC

@Jörg, I am no Akamai expert, but I assume what you mean is that cached pages in Akamai will only be refreshed from origin after the TTL has elapsed, correct? so if you have a long TTL, say an hour, this means there will be at most one hour where there are stale pages?

Translate
joerghoh
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
Nov 19, 2019 4:40 PM UTC

That's true. It depends if you can live with that.

To be honest, unless you provide time critical content like news or SEC relevant data, being a bit out of date doesn't really matter.

Translate
ahmedmusallam
Level 2
Nov 19, 2019 4:42 PM UTC

Ah ok. Yeah, I agree with you on that. But it's hard to get a client to adopt that. Clients typically want an instantaneous experience and want their content live, as soon as they hit publish. Which is not a bad expectation, if the code and APIs support it without complications.

Thanks for the insights!

Translate
joerghoh
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
Nov 19, 2019 4:47 PM UTC

But even in that case, invalidating the a page on Akamai will take minutes to take effect. So it's never instanteous. If you want to have full control over your site world-wide, you should not use CDNs.

But that has downsides too, and that's the reason why most customers give up some control for a better performance.

Translate
ahmedmusallam
Level 2
Nov 19, 2019 5:58 PM UTC

yes, of course, minutes are acceptable. I think Akamai's is 5 minutes or something close to that.  But that is significantly lower than 30 minutes or an hour. and would allow clients to have much longer TTLs.

Translate
joerghoh
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
Nov 19, 2019 6:39 PM UTC

But that doesn't make sense. If you set a TTL of 1 hour to your content, but invalidate content directly on Akamai (and let's say with an overall delay of 5 minutes), a browser will cache that for up to 60 minutes, and even if immediately after retrieving new content is published on the very same page, the browser can present for 55 minutes the same old content to the user.

Anyway, you can set a TTL of a page also to 5 minutes. In that case your traffic to origin will increase a bit, but you still get the benefit from using a CDN. Without too much delays and without actively invalidating Akamai.

Regards,

Jörg

Translate