Technical architecture question - possible to combine...

[360nohope]

Hi

My organization is currently undertaking a high-level/prelim technical architecture activity to redevelop some of our internal and external-facing websites, and I wanted to determine if the technical architecture they are proposing will be feasible

Background:

- Two (A and B) areas are looking at implementing AEM

- Area A has done some market research, and believe they have strong business case to implement on-prem AEM instance to satisfy internal web-based publishing needs. I don't have a lot more context on this work, only that there is no public facing element to this work, so they won't be publishing anything out to the web.

- Area B needs to support end-to-end authoring, workflow and publishing (to web)

- Senior management (with advice from IT) has decreed that team B should use Team A's on-prem AEM instance, or a "copy" of this instance for the purpose of authoring and workflow, and then publish out to a managed/cloud AEM website.

Besides the obvious questions around operational management/responsibilities, can anyone advise if this hybrid technical architecture model is feasible? Furthermore, are there any thoughts with regard to pros and cons of such an approach?

[Singaiah_Chintalapudi · Accepted solution]

One single AEM instance to host both application would be recommended for easy maintenance and cost-effective. You can restrict the gated content to your organization and allow the other content to be public.

Going to the cloud/AMS vs hosting on-prem (or on your cloud infrastructure) have its pros/cons.

On-Prem: You have more control over the servers and cost-effective

AMS: Generally expensive and less control on prod servers

On-Prem: Depends on your architecture, AEM upgrades might be difficult (the new AEM cloud service is version less, see below)

AMS: Extremely seamless

On-prem: You can leverage other tools your organization is using i.e. existing WAF, CDN..etc or choose your own tool

AMS: there are some restrictions how/what you can use or cannot use these on AMS

On-Prem: Maintenance Heavy you'll have to own and maintain the servers)

AMS: Extremely easy and Adobe maintains everything for you and they're very helpful

On-Prem: You can use any CI/CD tools (For instance, Jenkins) to maintain the servers

AMS: You can only use Cloud Manager which is great to performs the checks and bounces. It does provide a lot of functionality around security best practices

Why can't you use the AEM as Cloud Service? See more details here: https://experienceleaguecommunities.adobe.com/t5/adobe-experience-manager/main-differences-between-a... 

Thanks,

Singaiah

[360nohope]

Hi Singaiah, thanks for your response. Unfortunately this doesn't get me any closer to solving my issue. Specifically, I need to determine if an on-prem AEM instance could be used for the purpose of authoring and workflow, and then publish out to a managed/cloud AEM website instance. Noting that you mentioned a single AEM instance is recommended/preferred.

[Singaiah_Chintalapudi]

Hi,

[Singaiah_Chintalapudi]

Hi, The content flows from author to publisher and you can manage your custom workflows only on author and push the content to publisher hosted anywhere. I am not sure if AMS can allow this but in general, you should be able to push the content from author server (on-prem) to any AEM publisher server either on-prem or hosted on cloud. You just need to work with Infosec teams to allow the inbound/outbound connections from these servers plus the dispatcher servers for flushing.

[360nohope]

Hi Singaiah - appreciate the information!

[Singaiah_Chintalapudi]

Here are some good articles which talks about self hosting vs AMS:

http://www.jetteroheller.com/adobe-managed-services-vs-self-hosting-aem-pros-cons/ 

https://www.albinsblog.com/2018/09/adobe-experience-manageraemon-premises-to-AMS-cloud.html#.X0vThWd... 

[360nohope]

See comments section for answer.