As far as I know this is taken from the CDN.   (I forwarded this post also to the folks who build the BPO. Thanks for the feedback!)

Yes, in that case it is sufficient.   Regarding WAF: You can use Data Dome as bring-your-own-cdn solution, see https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/experience-manager-cloud-service/content/implementing/content-delivery/cdn.html?lang=en#point-to-point-CDN

As already mentioned, Sling Servlets are mounted to a single path, and even that does not fit into the "resource first" approach of Sling.   But you can register your servlet to /api and then read the remaining "parameters" via suffixes. Check the documentation at https://sling.apache.org/documentat...

All I could think of is a permission problem... Can you paste the the 3rd screenshot with the error message again, the path is not completely visible.

Oh well, we are constantly trying to reduce the slack in Sling  and make its performance on par with JCR; of course it's always a bit of overhead, but Sling offers some nice features which JCR cannot do; mostly because it's a fixed API we cannot extend anymore.

I am not sure if your screenshot shows the same component. The first screenshot shows a resource with the resourcetype "ProductTile2016" while the second shows a resource with the resourcetype "productTileReference".      

This error message is unrelated to the save operation (as it happens in the context of rendering that page).   This ERROR message is unrelated to your problem.

Why do you use Sling Distribution and not the replication API? It's not clear from your post if you need to distribute content from author to publish or from publish to publish.

Looks like you are using editable templates in your site. That means, that at rendering time the content of the template is merged with the content of the actual page (unlike static templates where the template is copied into the location where the resulting page is to be created). That means in the...

Oh sorry, overlooked the reference to Cloud Service. And yes, you are totally correct, that you cannot manage custom runmodes with AEM as a Cloud Service.