AEM Assets Instance as Single Source of Truth - Remote Assets Sync vs Connected Assets

[Rohan_Garg]

Hi AEM Community,

I have the below requirement in our project -

We want to have an AEM DAM/Assets instance which acts as the source for all other environments (DEV, Stage, Production) as well as some other portals which use some assets residing in our AEM Instance.

We have come across 2 options for our need -

1. Connected Assets

Drawback - This feature supports images only. It will not allow you to sync video assets, content fragments, experience fragments etc

2. Remote Syncing

Drawback - Recommended for Non-Production use only as per ACS Documentation.

(https://adobe-consulting-services.github.io/acs-aem-commons/features/remote-assets/index.html)

Query 1 - Is there any other way to achieve this feature ?

Query 2 - How can we sync video assets, Content Fragments, Experience Fragments across multiple environments in AEM ?

@digarg, @krati_garg, @lukasz-m, @Saravanan_Dharmaraj, @arunpatidar, @kautuk_sahni 

Thanks,

Rohan Garg

[krati_garg]

@Rohan_Garg I believe you can take a hybrid approach, where in for lower environments, you can use ACS Remote Synching tool and to cater other requirements, you can publish the required assets to a CDN and then let other portals consume these assets from the CDN. 

https://herodigital.com/insights/aem-experience-fragments/#:~:text=Experience%20Fragments%20are%20de....

As far as Experience Fragments are concerned, though not part of Assets, XFs can also be published and cached at CDN. Content Fragments and XFs can be delivered headlessly via AEM Content Services and many other methods. 
https://blog.3sharecorp.com/content-as-a-service-in-aem

[Rohan_Garg]

Thank you @krati_garg for your response!

So if I am interpreting it correctly, We won't need to establish a dedicated DAM instance.

The AEM Author (say Production) will act as the single source.

Lower Environments can remote sync themselves to this instance while the CDN based path for all assets can be exposed to different endpoints thereby decoupling the approach!

Can you point to any resources on consuming CDN based assets in an AEM/Non-AEM Instance ?

Meanwhile, I will explore more on this approach from point of view for User Management & ACLs, Versioning and Tagging as well once.
Thanks for the input!

[krati_garg]

@Rohan_Garg Can you please also mention if you are using AEMaaCS or AEM On Prem. And also, if you are using AEMaaCS, do you have your own CDN or plan to leverage on Adobe built in CDN, Fastly

[Rohan_Garg]

We are using AMS (Adobe Managed Services) (AEM 6.5.11).

We currently leverage Akamai as CDN.

[Rohan_Garg · Accepted solution]

Hi All,

This is more like an open ended question wherein the solution can vary greatly.

But what we have decided through is as follows -

1. The remote DAM instance acts as a central repo for all assets (Not just relevant to AEM)

2. We will not be using Akamai based end points for consumption as this would mean all assets would need to be available on CDN. Instead, CDN would be used only for live assets which are published.

3. Remote Sync is not a PROD recommended solution. So we will be using Connected Assets for images and documents while for non-image (video) assets we will be going for VLT RCP or Replication Mechanism. (Grabbit is also an option but has not been tested with AEM 6.5 lately)

The assets for Prod, Stage and DEV will be read only. The content authors and producers will have to login to Remote DAM instance for any changes.

This solution will ensure that different environments have single source of truth for DAM instance.

4. Besides this we have other portals, regional partners & stakeholders who will be storing their assets in DAM and will be able to consume this via Assets HTTP API.

Kindly let me know if you see any challenges or major obstacles in such a solution.