In the ever-evolving landscape of digital experiences, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) has consistently been at the forefront of innovation. With each new update, AEM seeks to empower organizations to create, manage, and deliver exceptional digital experiences to their audiences. The latest addition to AEM's arsenal, Edge Delivery Services, promises to take content delivery to the next level and redefine how businesses engage with their users.
In a world where speed and reliability are paramount, content delivery plays a pivotal role in ensuring your digital experiences are not just captivating but also accessible and responsive. AEM's Edge Delivery Services is hoping to become a game-changer in this respect, offering an efficient and cutting-edge solution to address the challenges of global content distribution, faster load times, and enhanced user experiences.
In this blog post, we will dive into the features and capabilities of AEM's Edge Delivery Services, exploring how it transforms content delivery, and how it can benefit your organization in an increasingly fast-paced and interconnected digital world.
A New Way to Author Content
The traditional AEM Sites page authoring experience requires authors to place components on a page and then place the appropriate content inside each component. The AEM Site page builder is among the best in the industry. But using it still requires specialized training and knowledge for content authors and marketers. In our experience it is often beyond the reasonable skillset of a product marketer to assemble a static marketing page from components. Many organizations have dedicated semi-technical resources that are responsible for AEM site authoring.
Since the advent of Content Fragments, AEM has allowed non-technical content authors to enter content via a form-based interface. This works great for structured content like blog posts, events, press releases, customer stories, etc. But the challenge of easily creating unique and non-structured-content pages remains.
Adobe is addressing this need with Edge Delivery Services, which integrates with common business tools such as Google Docs and MS Sharepoint. It is a unique feature that is exclusive to AEM among Enterprise Content Management tools. Edge Delivery Services allows marketers to create, manage and publish page content with very little training - simply by editing a Google Doc. It removes friction from the authoring experience by making it much easier for non-technical users to access the content platform.
What about the Developers?
Developers can code on Edge Delivery Services using just basic HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. No Java required! Adobe is providing a code template that speeds up initial development, which is similar to the AEM Archetype code. Adobe also provides a set of pre-made Blocks, which are similar to the AEM Core components.
Edge Delivery Services is a "serverless" platform, so the development pipeline and the deployment steps are greatly simplified. The downside is that the your developers and system architects have very little control over the underlying content-delivery logic. So if you have a requirement that is not possible within the boundaries of Edge Delivery Services you will need to have a separate system such as AEM Sites to custom code that behavior.
A Focus on Performance
One of the main selling points of Edge Delivery Services is its focus on page speed performance. Edge Delivery Services pages can achieve impressive Lighthouse Pagespeed scores. Indeed Adobe's goal is for all pages to have a perfect score of 100. Adobe includes continuous monitoring tools that help the the developers understand the implications on performance with each new code commit. Edge Delivery Services is able to achieve high performance scores using various techniques. The initial page load focuses on loading just the assets required for the largest content paint (LCP). Everything else is either lazy loaded when needed or in the case of third-party tags and other assets that do not impact the user experience - the load is automatically delayed. Shared elements like the main navigation or footer are cached from page to page.
Reasons to believe
What are the current use-cases where it makes sense to use Edge Delivery Services? Certainly the most obvious case is when you need to stand-up a small site and you do not want to have the higher cost and complexity of using traditional AEM. Also if you have a requirement for greatly optimized page speed test scores then Edge Deliver Services is a good choice. The serverless aspect also greatly decreases the time-to-launch.
