Notable Changes to AEM Sites as a Cloud Service notable-changes

AEM Sites as a Cloud Service provides experience management capabilities as part of the cloud-native AEM as a Cloud Service platform. In addition to core benefits of AEM as a Cloud Service, such as cloud-native scalability, uptime, and always being up-to-date, AEM Sites as a Cloud Service also provides several Sites-specific changes and additions.

Changes and additions in AEM Sites as a Cloud Service are as follows:

Asynchronous Page Operations asynchronous-page-operations

In AEM Cloud service, operations that traditionally have blocked the UI have been broken down into smaller tasks which run in the background.

The initiator of such actions can check their status in a new UI at /mnt/overlay/dam/gui/content/asyncjobs.html.

New Reference Site and Tutorial new-reference-site-and-tutorial

WKND, a new AEM reference site, has been updated and published to reflect best practices to build a web site with AEM, and with the comprehensive set of capabilities, components, and deployment models that are available in AEM. The new reference site and accompanying tutorial covers fundamental topics like project setup, Core Components, editable templates, client libraries, and component development with Adobe Experience Manager Sites.

Previously, We.Retail was installed by default with AEM (except when started in production mode). In AEM as a Cloud Service, a reference site is not installed by default. Instead the git repo and accompanying tutorial with the updated WKND reference site code is provided.

Capabilities not available at Runtime capabilities-not-available-at-runtime

AEM as a Cloud Service is always on and always up to date. Achieving this requires the separation of the AEM repository in immutable and mutable content, and prohibiting access to immutable content at runtime. For more details on mutable vs immutable content see Mutable vs. Immutable Areas of the Repository.

As a result of immutable content being inaccessible at runtime, the following AEM Sites operations are not available at runtime:

These capabilities can be used via local, standalone developer instances of AEM as a Cloud Service, for updating content and code in the AEM as a Cloud Service GIT repository, but not in hosted runtime instances.