Solving AEM DevOps Challenges, Part 4: Cumbersome Release Process

In the third article, we explored the challenge of Slow Development Cycles and how we used our AEM Cloud Docker Images, CLI, and On-Demand Environments to solve them. Part 1 discussed Inconsistent Environments, Part 2 covered Relevant Content for Testing and Validation, and Part 3 reviewed Slow Development Cycles. This article will focus on the challenge of Cumbersome Release Process.

Challenge 4: Cumbersome Release Process

With each client, we notice the need to automate the software release lifecycle, improve developer efficiency, find and address bugs quicker, and deliver updates faster. In other words — they often lack true continuous delivery with their AEM implementation. This is partly due to each client having their own hodgepodge technology stack which excelled at certain things but lacked in others. It also stems from the difficulty in organizing and deploying small development changes. This results in unhappy development teams, unhappy stakeholders, and unhappy budgets.

Solution: AEM Cloud Continuous Delivery

AEM Cloud creates a foundation for true continuous delivery by building ephemeral environments based on feature branches in Git. A developer creates a branch, make their commits, and a new environment is provisioned based on production configuration, including relevant content and the developer’s changes. From there, automated tests are run and the changes can be approved and ready for release.

This all happens once again through the power of Docker and Kubernetes — where we have built a reproducible AEM environment based on a configuration file that lives within the project’s repo. Allowing developers, authors, quality assurance engineers, and stakeholders to build and approve feature branches at will. This tool allows organizations to be agile and truly release as often as code is completed.

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