[AEM Gems | 4th September 2024] What's new in Rapid Development Environments for AEM?

[kautuk_sahni]

Session Details

During this AEM GEMs webinar, we will explain how RDEs allow developers to swiftly deploy and review changes, minimizing the amount of time needed to test features that are proven to work in a local development environment. In this session, we'll show you how you can use RDEs to reduce turn-around times during development and get near-instant feedback for code changes. Additionally, we'll introduce you to the latest features like improved logging and front-end support. Join us to learn more about what you can do with RDEs and let us know what you would like to see added next!

Housekeeping details:

1. Duration: 60 minutes including 10 minutes of Q&A
2. Audience: Technical Teams of Customers, Partners, and Adobe Employees
3. Recording and slides will be made available to the public after the session
4. The session is free of charge, registration will be required

Session Recording

Session Q&A

Question	Answer
Have you thought of any way to improve the time it takes for pipelines to execute?	This is an orthogonal topic. I believe improvements are being made continually for pipeline executions. However, lots of things need to happen behind the scenes during a pipeline execution. Therefore it will always be slower to run a pipeline than to deploy on an RDE that uses no pipelines.
Where is the Package processor executed? Locally? On the target system or in a CI platform in between?	In between.
Is RDE available for AEM Forms cloud offerings?	for the Forms addon? Yes, it should be (IIRC, there are some restrictions but in general it should work).
Package install have size limit, has that been updated?	It has been updated a couple of times. If it still doesn't work for you we'd like to hear from you to see if we can provide a solution.
RDEs are very unstable. Mostly it gets down post deployment (Service Outage). Sometimes it never comes back up. We would be forced to reset it. Any suggestions to avoid this?	Please contact us if possible and we'll look into it. It shouldn't be that unstable. We're available via AEM discord #aem-rde channel (feel free to use the discord invitation link we shared in the slides) or engage with us privately via email.
how many rde's do you get with an account? and what is the pricing for bigger teams	you get one RDE per solution (credit) - so if you have assets+sites you get 2 RDE. For pricing of additional RDEs you have to reach out to your account contact.
does each developer need to have their own RDE, or can several developers share the same RDE?	You can share them but it is not necessarily recommended (especially not  for working in parallel)
Joined a few mins late.  How many RDEs  are included in a license / how much do additional RDEs cost?	you get one RDE per solution (credit) - so if you have assets+sites you get 2 RDE. For pricing of additional RDEs you have to reach out to your account contact.
are you planning to support connecting  debugger to RDEs?	We are looking into that but there is no clear answer yet. However, the new logging feature helps a lot in seeing what is going on already. Makes it really easy to enable debug logging for something.
do we still need to restore the RDE in order to update the environment to the latest CM version?	Unfortunately, yes. However, we are hoping to have a solution for that soon.
Is there recommended best practice on how to embed RDEs? Like 1. Install locally via MVN -> test 2. Install on RDE via AIO -> test 3. Push to dev pipeline -> ... Or should the RDE replace one of these steps?	You can install any artifact using the aio commands. Usually, that means you want to build it with maven, but you could also download an artifact from e.g. maven central and upload it to the RDE.
Is there any way to set the environment variables in RDE via the command line	You can do that via the aio cloudmanager plugin https://github.com/adobe/aio-cli-plugin-cloudmanager?tab=readme-ov-file#aio-cloudmanagerenvironments...
when "restoring" RDEs .. the content get's lost?	I assume you mean "resetting"? Yes, at present a reset removes all content. However, we are looking into ways to allow content to survive a reset.
Does RDE also provide Fastly?	RDEs are no different with respect to the available infrastructure than other AEM CS environments. Thus it is also possible to use a CDN.
Does lower log level e.g. TRACE needs to be preconfigured in Logger Service for the bundle to get logs till lower level or is this differently done in RDE?	We should be able to add support for trace level with relatively little effort. However, at the moment it is not supported.
any plans to add th "Access" tab from CRXDE into the repository browser?	I believe an effort for this is underway.
Is there any way that we can debug application deployed in RDE using remote debug from intellJ?	Attaching a debugger remotely is not possible nowadays. For debugging purposes, instead, you could take advantage of the dynamic loggers feature via `aio aem rde logs` command so that you can deploy end create loggers on demand for the debugging case.
Can you tail CDN and Dispatcher logs?	The current `aio aem rde logs` command allows you to get only the AEM service logs itself, no CDN or dispatcher logs. There's a Cloud Manager AIO plugin command that you can use to gather more logs, but the delay is bigger so probably not very useful for this case. This is a good point that we're taking note as something to improve and implement for the future, thank you.
Are RDEs a good fit to run E2E tests on ephemeral environments when working on a trunk-based development?	Yes, we already have multiple customers running E2E tests on RDEs via their own pipelines, and it works like a charm! We implemented the --json flag in the AIO commands with this purpose. Actually some recommendations we could give here is to run the following flow each time you want to run your E2E tests (on a PR, on main branch before deploying to any other environment...): 1. take an RDE environment which is available. 2. Install the content and code you want to test. 3. Wait for the RDE to be fully deployed via `aio aem rde status --json` command and run your testing suites. 4. Run the reset operation for RDEs so that you'll start from scratch next time you pick up an RDE on a next pipeline execution.
how dynamic pages will work with this new approach	We don't get the meaning of dynamic pages in this context. We kindly ask the person who asked it to provide more details on the question.
What is the best way to write some code specific to RDE. Is there any environment variable that I can use to know the environment(DEV/STAGE/PROD/RDE) the code is running?	We have the RDE runmode, it's kind of a special runmode though since it picks up the baseline of the dev runmode and merge it with the RDE runmode. The idea behind that approach is that you'll likely always want to test your dev stuff + more new features on top of it. We're not aware of any other AEM capability to recognize you're running on an RDE
Does it support multiple projects / repositories ?	RDEs environments are not tied to pipelines and they're not tied to repositories either. You just build your local code and deploy it via the AIO cli tool to the environment directly. Therefore there's no problem with that, other than having conflicts in your code if you deploy multiple repositories with incompatibilities, but that could be solved by performing a reset operation in between so that yo start over.
Is there a way to specifically deploy dispatcher configurations to an rde besides installing the "all" package?	Yes, there's a specific installing type that you can use to just deploy the dispatcher configuration: `aio aem rde install -t dispatcher-config <path-to-zip-file-or-dispatcher-config-folder>` where the path for the install command can either be a zip you build locally for the dispatcher config or directly the folder containing the dispatcher code so that the tool does the zipping for you (so it helps with the symlinks management stuff)

Session Schedule

Wednesday, September 4, 2024, | 8 am PDT OR 5 pm CEST OR 8.30 pm IST

Speaker(s)

Natalia Angulo Herrera, SDE - Adobe, Karl Pauls. Sr CS - Adobe, Remo Liechti, SDE - Adobe & Julian Sedding, SDE - Adobe

Register at: https://adobe.ly/3yWr9OY 

Don't forget to register yourself for this session using the registration link shared above.