A Step-by-Step Approach for Migrating to AEMaaCS

 


AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) is Adobe's software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which provides clients with a CMS platform (Sites), Digital Asset Management (DAM, or simply Assets), and Forms.

It was released a few years ago with several upsides and a few downsides. In the intervening years, Adobe has continued to build on the pros while the cons continue to dwindle.

Some fairly large companies have been enticed with licensing discounts and package deals to embrace CS and migrate their AEM instances to it. We have helped a few of our clients with this journey and some are now live on CS. This post briefly describes the key steps involved in such a migration.

  1. Assess Current State

    The migration from on-premise (data center) or cloud-hosted to CS is not a lift-and-shift. Significant refactoring is required in order to make your AEM implementation ready for CS. Additionally, it's a great opportunity to modernize and clear off technical debt. 

    Adobe provides several tools like the Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) and Cloud Acceleration Manager (CAM) to help with the analysis of your AEM code base and recommend the best path and a list of to-dos for migration to CS.

  2. Prioritize Sites and Components

    There are two key strategies to choose from.

    One is to migrate your simplest site first in order to become familiar with the CS lifecycle, which is not trivial.

    The other is to migrate your most complex site first in order to solve the high risk elements of your overall ecosystem before you commit to a migration.

    The right choice for you might depend on a number of factors, including the complexity of your code base, the strengths of your team, appetite for risk, etc.

  3. Remediate and Enhance

    There are certain changes that are required for a migration to CS. For example, if you're still using Classic UI component dialogs, or static templates, or JSPs, you will need to modernize your implementation. 

    While you're knee deep in the code base, it's a great opportunity to future-proof your AEM implementation by making changes such as moving to the latest archetype so that, for example, you would be well positioned to move to an SPA-based architecture down the road if you wanted to.

    Some organizations even take the opportunity to do a complete rebranding and redesign.

  4. Automate

    CS uses Cloud Manager (CM) to automate and validate deployments so that, for example, no incompatible code is deployed and the code has adequate test coverage to protect you from regressions.

    Setting up your local development environments to efficiently handshake with CS and CM ensures rapid deployments and quick TTM for new functionality that your organization relies on in order to grow and flourish.

  5. Deploy and Test

    Once the code changes are done and the infrastructure is ready, it's time to start planning the migration of your content, taxonomy, metadata, and more. 

    Don't forget to test the authoring experience, which could be dramatically different if you're coming from the Classic UI experience.

    The real test happens once you start showing your stakeholders a few finished pages in a higher environment like quality assurance (QA), stage/staging, or user acceptance testing (UAT).

    Ideally, you should develop some regression test cases (manual or automated), both for authors and end-users, to make sure that you're on par with the user experience (UX) offered by the legacy AEM site that you're upgrading.

  6. Finalize

    Once you benchmark the website's performance, it's time to fine tune and finalize your environment sizing and caching strategy to achieve the best performance for your buck.

    You should be looking at performance for both authoring use cases as well as end-user use cases. Things work a little differently in CS so you should likely see and automatic improvement in authoring performance.

    If your AEM sites are integrating with other solutions such as analytics, optimization, CRM, etc. then this is the time to make sure all of them are functioning as needed before you cutover from your legacy website to the new CS-based website. 
Hiring an agency like One North that has done CS implementations for other customers not only gives you the additional resources needed for such an initiative but also mitigates any risk of errors during your migration to CS.

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