Advancing Developer Experience: AEM as a Cloud Service Innovations

AEM as a Cloud Service has been built with strong focus on robustness and security. However, our focus has shifted to improving the experience for developers. Over the past year, we've been experimenting with new features and tools to enhance developer workflows, though these are not yet ready for direct integration.

In this talk, we'll showcase these experimental advancements tailored specifically for developers. From simplifying development processes to introducing new tools, we'll provide a sneak peek into the future of AEM as a Cloud Service from a developer's perspective.

Simon

Will this work with private / company internal Git repositories?

Dominik Suess

As shared the Prototype was focusing on a full cloud native version running on codespaces with all its constraints but we also validated a local setup. As the tooling for codespaces needs to be public as we don't have controll over the ide infrastructure it would be possible to use the dockerimage (and/or the tooling within it) to perform the same locally or any self managed infrastructure.

Is there any other IDE than VSCode possible to run?
(see answer in talk video)
Is it available to connect to a regular DEV environment,not an RDE

Dominik Suess

This is currently not as easy due to the way how pods are managed and recycled which could reset the connection. For the high reliability multiple instances are running in parallel which will make it way harder to isolate debugging and traffic - for dev something that "may" be feasible but adds a level of complexity that we will only explore once RDE is production ready and is proving to be useful. so this is a strong "maybe" in the future ;)

Tomasz Sobczyk

Cost is the problem right now. I would need 20-30 rdes

Michael

Currently you can host AEM in a Docker instance. So you can have almost complete environments at you disposal for a fraction of the cost.

Barry

What github runners have access to the devcontainers provided by Adobe?

Dominik Suess

Access into the RDE environments is in our scenario controlled and secured through an mtls connection - the endpoint would be public but could only be accessed via mTLS which is generated based on IMS login.

Sentham

Should it has to be an IDE on the client side? isn't it possible to use our local IDE as usual?

Masoud Rozati

Does this support also debugging third-party libraries like core components, ACS Commons, etc? Local IDEs even decompile the code and enable debugging in 3rd party libs. How about RDE?

Barry

Will the pricing be consumption based?

Dominik Suess

This has not been producticed at all yet - this is a proof of concept and pricemodeling is being reviewed continuously by our product management team based on features and value for customer.

Beo

I want this on my local IDE! Any plans?

Nilesh Mali

It will be so helpful if it will display the code vulnerabilities as per Adobe code scanning rules.

(see answer in talk video)

Yegor Kozlov

Please support IntelliJ and Eclipse, this is the IDEs where people write server-side code

Dominik Suess

I hope my answer on generic tooling that will allow to build own tooling on top does satisfy your needs - maintaining a full end to end flow will probably not happen for all available IDEs at the same level. VS Code & Codespaces did provide us the option to easily set up a good end to end POC which is why we have used this.

Bartłomiej Gątarski

This tool should support also debugging not only project code, but also AEM SDK code. Does it?

Dominik Suess

You can like with any remote debugging step through the codelines to introspect how values hangge but I don't know of any plans to make implementation classes to step through. The open source parts you certainly always can link in your project

Simon

Deployments to the RDE take much longer then into a local SDK. This a blocker for me.

Dominik Suess

Please join us at the meet the experts session so we can have a look at the slowdowns you experience and validate if we can find ways to improve on either end.

Daniel González Postigo

Where we can found the documentation, container etc about remote debugging ?

Dominik Suess

This was a sneak peak from the labs - no official documentation so far but we will be revisiting this POC and the learnings out of it soon and will then decide how to get this in a productive state.

Beo

If I connect the debuger, is the environment exclusivly blocked for me? can I ensure any distubences?

Dominik Suess

This will be done through a gatekeeper which is blocking the traffic similar to the hibernation message if an instance is hiberanated - the debugsession the "owner" does create will then be linked on the one hand to a set of mTLS keys server and client use to build the tunnel as well as a token that would be stored in a cookie for the gatekeeper to allow passthrough.