AEM AaCS Upgrade Best Practice

[sdouglasmc]

When you upgrade AEM AaCS environment, do you always have to take the very latest update or is there a way to choose?

If you have to take the latest, then what is the best practice for testing the update through the environments.  With the mini releases, how can you be sure by the time you get to actually upgrading production, that it is the same version that was tested throughout the process? 

[Anish-Sinha · Accepted solution]

Hi @sdouglasmc ,
Stage and Production environment is auto updated to the latest version and is managed by Adobe. You don't have to invoke any process in order to update. To update the dev server on cloud, whenever new update is available, in the cloud manager UI, you will see "update available" option. You cannot select any specific version, It will update to the latest available version.

Also, with the upgrades, you will be testing your code on local, then dev, to make sure nothing breaks, and then same will be pushed to latest version. Moreover there are multiple checks that runs when deploying to stage and prod which make sure non compliant code will result in build failure.

More details you will find here:

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/implementing/using-...

[Kunwar]

For customer environments, Stage+Production environment are auto-updated with latest releases.

For every release that Adobe pushes, There is a strict testing regime where the release is tested on many customer environments to avoid any regressions. These tests include functional, UI variance and other forms of testing to have a confidence score which help decide if the release is ready for customer consumption.

On the top of it, Customers can add Functional tests for their application and once Adobe pushes the daily/monthly release such that if your custom functional tests fail while the Adobe updates your environment, your environment  won't be upgraded to latest release and would safe from the regression that might have been introduced.