Repoless, Serverless, and Stress-Free: Exploring AEM Edge Delivery Services

AEM Edge Delivery Services (EDS) is part of a growing shift in how modern websites are built and delivered. With a focus on speed, simplicity, and personalization, EDS is designed to meet the demands of today’s content-heavy websites, apps, and e-commerce platforms without all the traditional overhead.

The EDS landscape is evolving rapidly and has undergone several advancements in recent years. It has been referred to as Adobe Helix, Franklin, NextGen Composability, or Edge Delivery Services, but all labels refer to the same entity. This blog helps you understand AEM EDS and how your business can benefit from it.

 

What is AEM Edge Delivery Services?

AEM Edge Delivery Services is a suite of cloud-based content delivery and optimization services that aims to provide fast and efficient web user experiences.  EDS includes many services responsible for content delivery at the edge, such as asset, authentication, JSON, content, and CDN (Content Delivery Network) services. The Adobe-provided services run on ADOBE IO, a serverless environment.

AEM EDS is a content delivery platform that serves mobile-first web pages to customers straight from the edge with lighthouse scores of 100 or close to 100. EDS supports integration with all major CDNs (e.g., Akamai and Fastly, to name two), ensuring that web pages are served from the closest location to users for faster load times. 

 

Here are two key considerations:

• Development teams build web experiences using plain JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
  
  
• The platform provides a great authoring experience by allowing the creation and publishing of web pages using the tools authoring teams are already familiar with: AEM WYSIWYG authoring (enabled by Universal Editor), Google Docs, or Microsoft SharePoint.

Image 1 illustrates this:

 

EDS automatically optimizes assets like images, videos, and dynamic content for device-specific sizes. These optimizations can help to automatically compress or adjust media, eager or lazy loading of content on-demand, and other tweaks that make content delivery more efficient without sacrificing quality.

 

Repoless Multi-Site Management

EDS also supports running multiple websites using a shared GitHub repository. This approach is called 'Repoless Architecture' because all sites (except your first site) don't need a separate GitHub repository. Each website in this approach has a common organization name that matches the org name on the GitHub repository. The websites use a configuration service of their own. They can customize functionality, themes, and content sources while reusing the shared repository's code. Figure 2 illustrates this architecture, creating multiple websites of an organization using a shared code repository with different content sources:

 

Adobe's Real-User Monitoring (RUM) and analytics collect real-time data, providing insights into traffic patterns and user behaviors. This allows for adaptive content strategies, improving performance based on actual user data.

 

The Future of AEM Edge Delivery Services

From enhanced API capabilities to better support for mobile and web applications, the future of AEM Edge Delivery Services will undoubtedly include innovations that further solidify its position as a leader in the content management space. Looking ahead, AEM Edge Delivery Services will likely continue to evolve along the following lines:

• Faster and More Intelligent Content Delivery: Adobe continues to focus on providing fast, reliable, and globally distributed content delivery, now supporting more sophisticated, large-scale web applications and digital experiences.
  
  
• Security: Adobe continuously incorporates its security infrastructure to protect content during delivery, ensuring privacy and compliance.
  
  
• End-to-End Content Lifecycle Support: EDS supports you from content creation and management to content delivery, optimization, and real-time analytics.

 

AEM Edge Delivery Services is now deeply embedded in a full-stack digital experience solution. It can leverage tools like Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Digital Assets. The universal editor will eventually consolidate all AEM editors—such as the SPA, Page, and Content Fragment editors—into a single editor. Adobe continuously adds tools for A/B testing, experimentation, and real-user monitoring to the platform to ensure continuous quality and performance.

 

Conclusion

AEM Edge Delivery Services has come a long way since its inception, evolving from a simple document-based content delivery solution into a powerful platform capable of providing fast, personalized experiences to users across the globe. With EDS, Adobe aims to eliminate the need for complex frameworks, libraries, and abstractions and just focus on writing clean, performant code. As Adobe continues to innovate, we can expect the platform to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible in content delivery and digital transformation.