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AEM 6.5 EOL: Upgrade, Migrate, or Wait—What’s the Smart Move?

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Community Advisor

Hey Adobe community,

With AEM 6.5 heading towards End of Life (core support ends Feb 2027, extended support Feb 2028), a lot of us are asking: What’s next? Should we stick with Long-Term Support (LTS) or take the leap to AEM Cloud?

Let’s dig into the real questions:

  • Why Upgrade?
    Is it just about staying supported, or are there real benefits to moving forward?

  • LTS vs. Cloud: Pros and Cons
    What’s working for you with LTS? What’s tempting about Cloud? Any pain points or unexpected wins?

  • Who Should Go Where?
    Are there certain teams, industries, or use cases that make more sense for LTS or Cloud? How do you decide?

  • End-State Business Value
    What does success look like after the upgrade or migration? How do you measure the impact on your business or clients?

Share your experiences, opinions, and advice—whether you’re deep in migration planning or just starting to think about it. Let’s help each other figure out the smartest path forward!

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22 Replies

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Adobe Champion

The value prop of migrating to Cloud Service is something that's difficult to commoditize in a way that will resonate with everyone.  For example, saving on infrastructure can be high value to some orgs that struggle keeping AEM working efficiently (e.g. particularly those that have a high quantity and velocity of assets) whereas to others it might be minimal savings if their instance is humming and DevOps processes are highly automated.

 

When considering an upgrade, make sure you're thinking about it more than from purely the technical perspective. Yes, technology licenses and infrastrucure represent meaningful cost, but inefficiencies in your overall content supply chain due to a mess of page templates and components that have not been maintained well over time can be costing you a multiple of the technical costs, yet I don't often see people talk about that aspect.

 

When you upgrade, a big part of the value prop can (and many times should) be to also modernize/consolidate/clean up.  You're already going to be touching everything, regression testing everything, and maybe even reauthoring things depending on the required changes to your components in the upgrade.  If you're already going to be doing all that work regardless, it's now only an incremental effort to fully get onto best practices and make the authoring experience simple, delightful and efficient.  I'm wrapping up a Cloud Service upgrade right now for a client that did it the right way, and it was awesome to hear an author state "I authored the home page last night because I was having fun" - I assure you they would have never said that about their pre-migration environment.

 

I recommend everyone take a look at the first half of https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/events/the-skill-exchange-recordings/aem/aug2023/develope... which focuses on building the value prop of migration.

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Community Advisor

Really appreciate your take on the broader value of modernization and the authoring experience—those real-world stories are exactly what make these decisions tangible.


You raise a great point about the “hidden” costs of technical debt versus the visible costs of licensing and infrastructure. That’s often overlooked in upgrade conversations.


Curious—have you seen teams opt to stay on LTS, and if so, what was their main reasoning?


Would love to hear any perspectives or lessons from organizations that chose LTS over migration, and how that played out for them.


Looking forward to more experiences from the community, whether you’ve upgraded, migrated, or chosen a different path.