Continuous Experience Delivery with the New Cloud Manager for Adobe Experience Manager

Organizations are increasingly competing on the digital experience front to engage and acquire customers. However, as confirmed by Adobe’s 2018 Consumer Survey, sub-optimal experiences such as slow to load webpages and difficulty interacting with content can force almost half of the customers to completely abandon their viewing experience. With so much at stake, organizations need tools that allow them to scale their digital experiences efficiently for rising traffic, to minimize time to market for engaging experiences, and to respond to changes in a continuous manner.

A scalable, secure cloud-based infrastructure with tools for continuous delivery is the first step towards enabling smooth and engaging digital experiences at scale. To address this critical business need, we already offer Adobe Experience Manager on a managed cloud environment with 40+ operating regions, service level agreements up to 99.99 percent and enterprise-grade security certifications, including FedRAMP, GLBA and HIPAA.

To further this mission, in Experience Manager 6.4, we are introducing Cloud Manager – a self-service interface with state-of-the-art continuous integration and continuous delivery framework. This will enable customers and their implementation partners to build and test Experience Manager applications in the cloud as well as speed the delivery of custom experiences or updates from months to days. With Cloud Manager, organizations can leverage:

Self-Service Interface

This newly designed UI enables IT teams to easily configure, manage and monitor the underlying cloud environment that supports their Experience Manager application. They can use a point and click interface to configure different types of cloud environments such as production, staging, development or testing. In future releases, the portal will also offer real-time monitoring of application performance, capacity usage and ability to build custom reports for enterprise-wide visibility. While the new self-service interface puts the control back in the hands of the customer, it also offers links to best practices and access to experts within Adobe who can provide necessary guidance as needed.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Pipeline

One of the key advantages of Cloud Manager is the ability for IT teams to exercise CI/CD to speed delivery of custom code or updates from months to days. These may consist of adding interactive components on the website, delivering innovative navigation layouts or deploying personalized portals and more. Through the Cloud Manager UI, IT teams can setup and kick-off a pre-configured CI/CD pipeline that automates code deployment across different environments as well as automates functional and load testing processes to increase deployment efficiency. The pipeline leverages Adobe best practices for code inspection and security validations, ensuring a high-quality release and minimizing the likelihood of any disruptions in production environment.

Flexible Deployment Modes

Once the quality checks have been verified and fixed, code can be setup to be deployed through different trigger modes. With an automatic trigger mode, the code gets automatically deployed to a specific environment after it passes the quality gates. For production environment, the code deployment can be scheduled during specified time frames, even outside business hours, or manually deployed for maximum control. In essence, Cloud Manager offers IT teams the necessary flexibility needed to continuously deliver experiences that satisfy business needs.

As customers increasingly look to move to cloud, Cloud Manager offers the necessary self-service tools to increase agility in delivering new experiences and updates, ensure optimal performance, and gain valuable insight into their key investments.

We’re incredibly excited about the innovations behind Cloud Manager and the impact it’ll have for our customers. We’ll continue the story at Adobe Summit NA and Adobe EMEA. If you’re planning to attend, check out the session on Cloud Manager to learn more and see it in action.