// Key takeaways

• PANELISTS:
• MODERATOR:
• Discussion Topics

Following on the success of our last panel discussion on AEM’s cloud future, I got the chance to moderate a panel discussion on AEM devops & maintenance best practices courtesy of Adobe Global Community.

The discussion was held on 28 July, and I’ve now got the replay up and available here:

PANELISTS:

Brad Coleman is an AEM Architect at Rackspace Technology. He has been working in the DevOps arena of Adobe Experience Manager for 7 years, with over 20 years of experience on Java-based web applications. He leads the Rackspace Application Services AEM team, which is a managed service provider for companies running AEM.

Anuj Ratra is the Digital Transformation Leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the cloud computing, digital and e-commerce/omni-channel.

Joey Smith is Director of Client Enablement and DevOps Engineering for Hoodoo Digital. A founder of AEMPodcast.com and AEMhq.com, he has a passion for getting developers to take a more active role in the long-term maintenance of the AEM platform.

MODERATOR:

Tad Reeves is a Principal AEM Architect at ICF Next who has worked with the AEM / CQ platform for the last 10 years, and has been involved in enterprise operations for over 20 years. As a devops engineer and architect, he’s had his hands on AEM/CQ implementations from over 40 different companies on virtually every hosting platform.

Discussion Topics

The topics we took up in the webinar (with deep-links to each of the points in the video) were:

• 2:48 What mistakes do you commonly see people make when trying to self-host an AEM installation?
• 10:40 From an operations and maintenance perspective, what activities do you see that are the most important to automate for an AEM site?
• 15:28 What classes of tooling do you see as being most valuable in an AEM hosting environment?
• 20:21 Should every AEM environment be hosted in the cloud? Is there any case to be made for an on-premise installation in a corporate or colo datacenter?
• 29:16 If you were going to name three things that are the most important to a smooth-running AEM environment, what would you target?
• 38:12 What value does a managed hosting provider bring to the table (whether it’s Adobe’s managed services or another Adobe partner)?
• 49:10 From an operations and a readiness perspective, what should teams do to prepare their sites for the future, regardless of whether AEM as a Cloud Service is a viable option for your company?
  
  And bonus question:
• 53:53 Is there anything unique that AMS [Adobe Managed Services] brings to the table that other solution providers cannot? Is there a compelling reason to go to another provider than the company that developed AEM? What do competitors do better than AMS?

Thank you so much to Joey, Brad and Anuj for being part of this panel! So often, when one is making a presentation like this, and you’re talking about new products & features, it gets a bit to marketing/salesey and not just the brass-tacks & practical discussion that we were able to have here.

Please hit me up on LinkedIn if you have any other questions stemming from this that you’d like to ask!

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