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:

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...