Rapid Development Environments for AEM Cloud Service
AEM as a Cloud Service provides great operational benefits, additional services and addons. However in the past for developers it could mean that they had to wait for a pipeline to finish before they could test their code in this environment.
The recently introduced Rapid Development Environments (RDE) for AEM as a Cloud Service improve the developer experience by allowing to deploy changes rapidly to a cloud environment. This drastically reduces the turn-around times during development and provides near instant feedback for code changes.
This way RDEs support iterative development scenarios for AEM as a Cloud Service. Developers can deploy swiftly to AEM instances in the cloud, for example to update Java code, configurations, scripts, content and dispatcher configurations. The changes are directly applied to those running instances.
In this session, we will introduce RDE in detail and show real examples and demos on how developers can take advantage of RDEs to:
- Deploy experimental changes directly to a running AEM environment
- Test their content and code in a real cloud environment during development
- Get quick feedback on their changes
Additionally, we will present ways to integrate RDEs into day-to-day developer workflows and scenarios.
Tomasz S
Are you planning to add FE pipelines support dor RDEs? Do you envisage it being fully supported on RDE?
David Bosschaert
Yes this is currently being worked on.
AlexanderEggers
You mentioned some extra work being done during the upload of the changes. Are there any conditions under which the upload would fail?
David Bosschaert
The validations are similar to what happens in the build pipeline. For example if the content uploaded contains native code it will detect this and fail.
Michael
How do you get to know the host url or that RDE? How many RDE van we have?
David Bosschaert
You can get the URL from Cloud Manager, the same way you get the URLs of a normal AEM CS environment. There is no technical limit to the number of RDEs you can have.
Tiago Neves
Can the version of the rde be defined on creation?
David Bosschaert
Not yet, as Andres mentioned this is being looked into.
Behzad
Re-deploying sample content after each RDE reset is very time consuming... Is there a plan to give RDEs the option to keep specific content during reset?
David Bosschaert
This has been mentioned as a good extension. It's not there right now, but hopefully in the future.
Masoud
Is it possible to have multiple RDE in a program for example to test multiple feature branches in parallel?
Tomasz S
Yes. You get few out of the box and you can buy more
Shakkir
Is there an IDE plugin support from aio/rde
David Bosschaert
There is a prototype, which we did for use with Github Codespaces but it's not GA yet. On the other hand, calling a commandline tool from any kind of other tool is easy to do...