Fast and easy AEM deployment in the cloud | AEM Community Blog Seeding

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Fast and easy AEM deployment in the cloud by Wunderman Thompson Technology Blog Posts

Abstract

Deployment of AEM in the cloud does not have to be complex and time-consuming. In this article, we describe a novel approach to AEM setup in the cloud using Gradle AEM plugin (GAP) supported by Terraform for the infrastructure and Ansible for configuration management. This article is the outcome of our internal RnD project and we believe it can be useful when you think about in-house AEM deployment model, outside of the Adobe's offering.
AEM in the cloud?
Setup of the AEM in the cloud nowadays is easier and more automated than ever. Adobe Cloud Manager provides automated tools for continuous integration, delivery (CI/CD) and tests of the application code deployed on top of the cloud environment. Different AEM deployment models are explained in this Cognifide blog post. But what if we would like to run AEM in the cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP etc.) outside the Adobe framework for example for development or testing purposes?

Setup of AEM in the cloud can be divided into setup of the underlying infrastructure and deployment of the AEM application. It requires some knowledge about cloud services, infrastructure security, automation frameworks and DevOps approach to make this process easy but still flexible. What does it mean?

Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) together with Configuration Management paradigms allow us to design and implement the framework for setup of the AEM in the secure and reliable virtual environment in the cloud using Gradle AEM Plugin (GAP). We called it GAp-In-Aws (GAIA) because currently it supports AWS cloud infrastructure setup, but solution described in this article can be cloud agnostic, it just requires adapting Terraform configuration for chosen cloud provider. Sounds good?

Solution architecture
In the GAIA proposed solution, we divided process of setup AEM in the cloud into two parts:
1. Infrastructure management – this sub-process should be run first. During this part we configure basic cloud infrastructure. We use Terraform to setup EC2 instance with EBS volume in the cloud and AWS CLI (Command Line Interface) to configure DNS record. This part of the process is strictly related to the services and capabilities provided by the cloud operator.

2. Configuration management – this sub-process should be run on top of the running cloud infrastructure. During this part we install all needed tools, run AEM and httpd with dispatcher. We use Ansible for configuration of the AEM. This part of the process is cloud agnostic – it can be run over any cloud (or even on prem) environment which provides Unix-based runtime and access via SSH (Secure Shell) protocol.

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Fast and easy AEM deployment in the cloud

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