Ep19 - Edge Delivery & AEM Development and Ops Deep Dive

[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to the Arbery Digital Experiences podcast, where strategy meets technology. Got a topic, suggestion or want to see how Arbery can boost your digital presence? Let's talk. Visit arberrydigital.com or find us on LinkedIn. Now, on to today's episode. [00:00:17] Speaker B: Welcome to Arbery Digital Experiences. This is episode 19 and today we are joined by Sean Archerbeck, software architect, has worked in the edge delivery space for a while, and Justin Randle, developer at Arbor Digital. I'm Tad Reeves, principal architect at Arbor Digital. Today's topic is the difference between AEM and edge delivery and all the different changes in mindset and project makeup and so forth that goes into that. So, Justin, you're going to emcee us here. Take it away, man. [00:00:47] Speaker C: Absolutely. So, yeah, first of all, just to mention, see the bike in the background there. Tad of your, of your preferred method of transit. And Sean and I were discussing before the podcast here as well, some mountain biking and skiing and all of our collective injuries over the years of having a few mishaps here or there. So I didn't know if either of you wanted to go down maybe how, doing those activities. You know, I find that when I do exercise or I'm running or doing something like that, I'm usually keeping myself from thinking about the physical activity and I'm working on something else. Do you find that it's not only just an energy release, but do you solve problems while you're doing your mountain biking, your skiing? Do, do, do you run different experiments in your head? Have you read. Oh, something out? [00:01:41] Speaker B: I could, I could go first on that because, yeah, I, I, I find it a release from, from sitting in front of a computer. I mean, I've got a big fat screen in my face for whatever, however many hours per day. Usually more than eight, usually significantly more than eight. And so I need to, I need to get away from that. And I find that sometimes the longer running problems, sometimes they only solve as soon as I'm away and seeing things that are further away. But also exercising because sometimes it's just a walk. Some of you just need to walk and just, and just get away from it for a second. Other times you need to like, threaten yourself with death a little bit and, and, and, and successfully, ideally avoid death and, and that usually usually helps out a bit. [00:02:28] Speaker C: Absolutely. [00:02:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Kind of the same for me. I, at one point, I, you know, just doing my daily run one day, trying to solve some hard problem and went out on my run just thinking, all right, I'm just going To, I'm just gonna go running. I'm done with this. And the solution just came to me while I was running all of a sudden. And then I'm running like a six minute clip back to black, back to my house so I can hurry. And after that experience, you know, I sort of taken that with me through my career. I, you know, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm challenged by something and I keep refactoring and I can't figure it out, it's like, let's go do something else for a minute. [00:03:08] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:03:09] Speaker B: Yep. [00:03:10] Speaker A: And that's when all my best ideas sort of come to me. So it's kind of funny. [00:03:14] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. And it's, it's just, it's something that I've had other people go, how do you run? Or how does, I can't run, you know, I get too tired, I get to this and I always tell them I'm not even thinking about running while I'm doing it. That's, that's background, that's abstracted away from what I'm actually doing. And I'm really just in my head working through problems. And it kind of makes me think of what we're going to discuss here today of getting into edge delivery services from aem. This is kind of a new paradigm and a new way to think about constructing and putting together all the pieces of a website that traditionally only worked a certain way. Right. And so to get, to get engineers and developers and marketing teams and everybody that's going to touch their hands on this, to really understand it, it takes a, you know, a little bit of a mind shift set to get away from traditional thinking about it. But just briefly, I don't know who wants to go here first, if Tad. If you want to go and give a little background. But you know, when we start talking about edge delivery services, what does that even mean? Right. That's kind of the big question is. Okay, now we're on to the next thing. Oh gosh, I just learned this. Now I'm on to the next one. So how do we digest this and really make it palatable to somebody that goes, that sounds scary. That's the boogeyman. I want to stick with the familiar misery that I know of, slogging through daily code and lines and debugging and, you know, working on changes. What is that mind shift set looking like right now? Or I guess just what, what's, what's on the forefront with edge delivery services? And what does that look like? [00:04:44] Speaker B: Well, I mean, I, I can, I can start out with that because so Sean and I come from, I know vastly different backgrounds because, because Sean is. I mean, actually I don't know about background because you were saying that you, you originally started out as a. In design, right? Like graphic design, like print design? Yep. [00:05:01] Speaker A: I started out with print design and graphic design and got a job as a web designer and kind of got me into learning about CSS and the front end. Worked with the developer and decided this is really cool and checked back into school for software. So yeah, I started out, you know, kind of just creating, you know, layouts to, to build people's websites and. And evolved into a software architect or engineer. [00:05:30] Speaker B: That's funny because, because, because so I also started out like graphic design. That was my. So I actually started out wanting to design cars like mechanical engineering. And then I was like, okay, good. I actually don't want to just do calculus stuff all day for, you know, figuring out gear meshes and angles and like I was like a good. I'm out of that. And so I was in graphic design. I worked at a screen printing shop for a while doing like, you know, hats and stuff like that and T shirts on Coreldraw and. But then eventually I was like, okay, I don't, I don't know that I can make ends meet just as a graphic designer. And being a web designer wasn't necessarily enough of a career. It's like 96 or something like that. So I just ended up in systems, basically do it first doing tech support and then in as the system engineer. And so that's, that was kind of how I've ended up bending finally back around because the more systems you do, you end up doing other things in websites. And next thing you know, I, I'm, I'm back doing, you know, front, front end type stuff as well. But, but front end was. Hasn't been my full time job in like 20 years. But, but still. But to answer your question. Back to answer your question, Justin. So, so edge delivery coming from an ops type background systems because I'm used to like blocks of things that connect to things, physical wires, blinking lights, stuff like that. Edge delivery is a totally different way of thinking about how to make a website because traditionally you're going to have a content management system that's going to be serving up a website. Whether you're talking about AM or you're talking about a Drupal or a WordPress or an Optimizely or whatever, Sitecore or something like that. Those are all servers Services that have a big data repository where you stick all your content and they're spitting out pages based off of dynamic ways of chunking together pages and they all have their own eccentricities and stuff like that. Edge delivers an entirely different way of thinking about it in terms of it's, it's document centric, its basis is documents. And you're heavily leveraging content delivery networks, caches and stuff like that with the aim of making both the developing experience and the serving of those pages as absolutely fast as it could possibly be. And also make the content generation experience as fast as it can be. Because sometimes, as we know from dealing with almost any, even dealing with WordPresses and stuff like that, sometimes getting the content that you want out can be a headache. But that's my backend view of it. Sean, how would you, how would you describe that difference in the way that the approaches from an old CMS to a new cms? [00:08:15] Speaker A: So one of the things that I sort of saw kind of working in Adobe and building out some of this was that sort of CMS mindset needing to change so that you could view things from a document point of view. So when you're looking at a page instead of you, you know, looking at it like you're going to take a cms, all the tools that are in the CMS to kind of like dial things in, instead you're looking at it as you're going to lay down, lay out the document itself. So it's kind of putting your mind in a, in a different viewpoint. And people have been using CMSS for the last 20 plus years. So it can be a little bit of a challenge to move over to that, I think. But from a, from a development perspective, you also sort of have to change the way that you're looking at things. Instead of sort of generating everything, you know, like in the CMS and rendering it on the page, you're going to render what you wrote into the document on the page and then you're going to go ahead and come through afterwards and make it look and act the way that you want it to look and act. [00:09:21] Speaker B: Right? [00:09:22] Speaker A: And so I think from both an authoring and a development perspective, it's kind of a mind shift that you're going to make from seeing things as being generated by a content management system to literally authoring a document. And that document represents what you're going to see on the page. [00:09:39] Speaker B: Right? And I feel like, like the, the, the, the style of optimization that, that you have to do in order to make something like that perform in an acceptable way. Both, both from making it render for the public in a, in an acceptable speed, but also to make it easy to make and easy for an author to work on. You're constantly working around this idea of things that, that are generators, things that, that, that could spit out titles and things that could spit out tags and spit out pieces of a page and stuff like that and render it out dynamically so that when you ask it for something, it makes, it can, can make, it can piece together your page. But then you're constantly thinking back to, well, how, how long is it taking my thing back there to, to put everything through the meat grinder and, and spit out this page that I wanted and, and, and sometimes for expediency's sake, you're trying to, trying to make it go faster. You're like, oh, I really wanted this sidebar widget. And so I, I found something that'll do that. But how long does that take? How much baggage does that, does that bring along with it? All that sort of thing it can, can make things, can make the whole thing, it can make it difficult, I think to optimize, but also difficult or different to come over into that document mindset. [00:10:57] Speaker C: That's a good answer. So from that perspective between the traditional implementation of aem, right, as a cms, what is the difference? Or how would you define edge delivery services as opposed to the typical installment? [00:11:14] Speaker B: So edge delivery is a service from Adobe and it is a service that's offered along with aem. So these days when you buy aem, cloud service, which is Adobe Experience Manager, is Adobe's premier really high end content management system for the largest brands. So if you have anywhere from a mid sized brand to the very largest website brands on the Internet, if you need a premier solution that does anything that a large brand could need, a content management system to do, which is that that functionality breadth is extraordinarily wide because, because you need to solve everything from a bank website to you know, an automotive brand to a fashion brand to a TV show like video heavy content heavy, login experience heavy. And they all have to be able to work with, with one piece of software. AEM was the thing that Adobe had and it still has. There's a lot of, there's a lot of use cases still for aem, but for a lot of brands they're seeing that a lot of traction, a lot of value in this edge delivery offering, which is faster to work with, faster to develop on and to me leaves more time for a lot of the other fun stuff that a lot of times we just don't have a, we don't get a chance to get to because we're too busy trying to make pages that we want. [00:12:47] Speaker C: Well, with having said that too, and talking about the speed and efficiency and performance of edge delivery services, making the transition shift from being a AEM on PREM or AEM as a cloud service, what does that look like? Say, you know, especially from the authoring side. Right. You know, and putting that content out if a user has no experience with edge delivery services, that's a big question, right. What's the training going to look like? What's the turnaround time going to look like? How long is this going to take to implement and get people up to speed to work with it? So starting at zero, you have to introduce this to someone. What's that kind of come up on edge? [00:13:28] Speaker B: So you were a front end engineer first and then you came to, came to working on aem, what was that like hitting like, because as a, as a competent front end guy who's done, who solved a bazillion problems on, on a bunch of different platforms, what was that like arriving to aem? Like, did you find that you were immediately useful or was there like a mega learning curve? [00:13:53] Speaker A: I was pretty frustrated when I first started working on it, to be honest. Just the challenges of building the application itself, it just took time. And I had to, you know, spend a few days getting all of my environments all set up and getting everything ready and then building and troubleshooting because I had errors, you know, and then to add insult to injury, you know, through the development process, somebody would push something and I'd pull it down and it would break it again. And so I'd spend another few days trying to fix it, you know, in, in Slack or in my messaging. Hey, you know, what did I do wrong here? What can I do to fix this? What can I do? I can't get it to build right now, right? And so a lot of frustration, especially kind of bringing me on and being, being pretty green when it came to aem. I'm, I'm going, this is ridiculous. I can't get anything done. I just want to fix this bug, but I can't even get the app to build right now. And so that could have been a user error. But I do just feel like the whole process of getting all the environments set up, getting everything ready, getting it, building, getting debugging, going and doing all of that, it's just kind of a big lengthy process and it seems like with EDS and the development process there, you just kind of skip a lot of that. A lot of the pain that comes. [00:15:11] Speaker B: With trying to set up almost all of that. I mean, as an operations guy, I, I was a lot of times dealing with, trying to deal with. And like, so I like, as an operations guy, you have different, different audiences, right? Like, you've got the external audience, but then you have developers that you're trying to service and trying to keep them productive and because at any given time, only like a quarter of your environments are the actual production gear, the rest of it's all the development pipeline of like, your dev environments and stage and QA and load test environments and things that you're trying to spin up to try to keep people alive. And the number of frustrated people coming to me saying, I can't develop, or it's broken here, or there's a user that's reported an error on Prod, but I don't see it on dev or stage or qa. Can you make it work? And then I have to say, well, now I have to copy all four terabytes of Prod down to QA for you to be able to test this issue because it only. It's, it's difficult. It's challenging. And it's challenging like that. It's like that with, with all, almost every, basically every previous cms that I've worked with too is, is. Is that is the challenge of environments. And copying all that content around is, Is tough. The, the, the whole. I hate saying the word paradigm shift because I feel like I'm saying buzzwords, but it's a different, It's a different way of doing it where you're. We're working with a flexible front end that's fast to work on and you have access to all the Prod content. So it's like I can take anybody and I feel like getting somebody, if I get somebody talented like you, and I say, here, plug into this, and you're instantly productive. There's no, there's no bunch of environments to deal with. There's no. I need access. I need, you know, 3 tera, 3 terabytes free on my laptop so I can pull everything down or something like that. Like, you just start working. [00:17:06] Speaker C: So from that perspective, you would say it has some benefits in turnaround time of getting, getting a little bit deeper reach than you previously would have gotten with just am. Right. [00:17:18] Speaker B: Oh yeah. But like, so like, like Sean, as an example, like, for you, if you were given hold of like a couple University grads who were really hot. Just straight up CSS JavaScript people never touched AEM. What's your estimate on how long you would take you to get them up to speed? [00:17:40] Speaker A: I mean, within the hour. [00:17:44] Speaker C: Wow. [00:17:45] Speaker A: You literally, you show them, open up your terminal, here's run this command, this command, this command and they'll have a working dev environment where they can clone their GitHub repo they want to work on and go ahead and start writing CSS and JavaScript right off the bat. Easy to understand, easy to start working on and, and having a development environment open with staging. So one of the great things, you can create a branch for them to work on and you can go look at that branch live. And so there's no creating a stage or doing anything like that. I mean you literally can put, you could be to work, you know, within the day, ready to go. [00:18:26] Speaker C: Right. So it seems much more streamlined, it seems much more intuitive, albeit after, especially if you have some previous indoctrination or rhetoric, you know, from, from knowing a right and having historical background. It seems like that barrier to entry once kind of over that little hurdle, especially given if you had some pretty preconceived notions, it makes sense much quicker. It's much easier to put in the hands of someone with the skill set to go. These are the steps, these are the processes and give that layout and you can watch them go off and run like you just said, within an hour. Right. I mean, that's incredible. [00:19:04] Speaker B: I mean, I mean and as a, as a datum of comparable magnitude. So one time I got, I got pulled onto a new team that was, it was an AM site and I had a fresh laptop, I had detailed instructions and the detailed instructions actually worked. Right. They were actually well formed detailed instructions. [00:19:24] Speaker C: You're lucky. Yeah. [00:19:25] Speaker B: And I had, yes, super lucky, well documented detailed instructions and I had to check out everything and get it to run and build on my laptop. It took me one and a half days just to roll all the way through those instructions and I was efficiently just plugging away at doing those things and they all did work and it took me a day and a half just to get the build up. I wasn't doing anything useful yet. That was just to make the build work. And so, so just the whole idea of just having the whole thing working and you're actually doing useful stuff in an hour, I just, I don't, I don't know if enough people have, have enough of an appreciation for what that is compared to because, because most of the time you don't have all your instructions that work right. [00:20:11] Speaker C: Well, and again, that, that leaves your dev team and it leaves your, your entire project in limbo until we can get, you know, someone that understands this, can set it up, can get working with it. And I think of that from a perspective of a business going, hey, we need a solution. We need this to be not, you know, just fish in a barrel, but we need it to be simplistic enough that we can turn this over and, and get some return on investment. Because a lot of times, especially if you're talking about edge delivery services to someone that is working with a traditional CMS like AM and trying to get them to understand the power and speed of it and the simplicity, a lot of times they go, no, no, again, we're comfortable with what we're using. This works, you know, we, we're staying afloat somehow. We keep plugging the holes, but kind of, can you speak to that, a little bit of maybe what that looks like for either a company that is not on AEM or has never worked with them, or that is on AEM currently? What, what does that look like in trying to say, hey, here's this great new functionality and tool coming out from Adobe, we'd like to talk to you about it. How do you even broach that conversation without getting the pushback of, no, no, that sounds way too complex because of our previous experiences in this venture. [00:21:27] Speaker B: You want to take that, Sean? I mean. [00:21:33] Speaker A: So, yeah, I mean, I think when it comes to complexity, I think highlighting the fact that it really actually is pretty simple in the way that it, in the way that EDS works, you're literally looking at it like this. We're going to put HTML, we're going to write it out onto a document, going to save that document, and then AEM is going to go ahead and serve that up to us as pure HTML. And so I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a maze of tech stack and technology buzzwords and everything that you can get into, you know, for your business's website, where, you know, it just makes it really complicated. And, and so I think kind of approaching it in a place of this is really simple actually. And that's why you can just go at it with vanilla JavaScript and go ahead and have a beautiful website. And so, yeah, that's sort of my answer to that one, if that makes sense. [00:22:36] Speaker B: Now, one thing too that I've gotten a number of times from folks looking, they're like, okay, this is so they're used to aem, which AEM is like, is like the Swiss army knife of Swiss army knives. Like it's just, it's just like a Swiss army knife that's like, like a porcupine of tools that just have everything that you could possibly. It's like, it's like when R2D2 gets shocked, you know and all the tools are just like out all over the place. It's like that. Except for that's like what it's like when it boots up, right? And, and so you're like oh well I'm going from that which that thing does literally everything how. And you look at that as compared to edge delivery out of the box. And I've had people say well that just sounds like it's just a, it's just a prettier static site generator. And so, and so it doesn't sound like it can do anything that, that a real legit CMS can do. Sean, what would you say are some of the, I mean if you just think of a, think of an example big kid problem that, that a big kid CMS needs to solve. Things like templating, design systems, tooling for authors, dynamic navigation, indexing, you know, stuff like that. That is, that, that is, that can be, you know, experience fragments, things, things that you get, things that you're used to on AM and you say well what about this great thing that I, that I created for am? How, how are you going to do that with a document based system? [00:24:09] Speaker A: So yeah, I think there's a few major things that you know, bigger websites and corporate and outfits are looking to have that kind of comes out of the box. You've got bulk publishing and you've got localization and you can actually in the bulk publish tool you can index and de. Index bulk, bulk amounts of pages at once. And so managing all of that, you kind of get all of those tools, you're not forced to build them. But that being said, it's so flexible that you could build your own solution if you needed to because it isn't, you know, open source. You can hit their API as long as you're authenticated. You know also, you know, some other things like dynamic navigation, it's easily solvable. It's really easy to just get creative about how you are authoring all of your pages and make things super dynamic. All it takes is writing a little bit of JavaScript and looking for what you're rendering HTML wise and making decisions based on what you get. So you know, I think it's pretty open ended when you look at it from a solutions perspective, when you face a big issue, you can be pretty creative about how you go about it. You know, there isn't like a set fixed way that, that you need to go about doing something. And I personally, so far in my development journey using, using this product, I haven't really faced anything that I didn't find a good solution for. [00:25:53] Speaker B: Right. [00:25:54] Speaker A: And so it doesn't really say that. [00:25:56] Speaker B: About AEM traditionally unfortunately, because sometimes I, I, I, I did feel like, I mean, and again I want to, I, it sounds like I'm putting AM down. AM is again a, an absurdly powerful product. I've built the last 15 years of my career out of running things off of aem. But because it's this big thing that does everything that a lot of times you're so used to piping everything through this that you shouldn't necessarily pipe everything through this. You're like, well I can get it to generate me a list of these things and I'll just generate the list dynamically. Well, AM's not really fast when generating a lot of things, especially when you're trying to make a list out of something that doesn't isn't already pre generated out of an index. So you're like, so it sometimes, sometimes after you finally architected something and spent six months on it saying okay, good, I made it work. It's kind of slow, but I made it work and it works and it looks good and the CEO likes the way that it looks. Now it takes eight seconds to load the blog homepage. [00:27:03] Speaker C: Right? [00:27:03] Speaker B: I kind of wish it didn't, but it does. And going back and re architecting that now is probably not going to happen and I don't have another half million I can ask for for it. So you guys are, we're just going to have to up the cache. Next thing you know, you're basically essentially back to making AM be a static site generator. [00:27:21] Speaker C: Yeah, that's an interesting point. That was, that was a question I was going to bring up as well is with a traditional installment of AAM and running on that platform, what, what is the difference in what you just mentioned, say on Edge versus aem, if you do go? Well, I do need to go rework something. I need to redo this page fragment, content block or an entire site. What does that look like? Or I guess versus using aem, what is the speed and flexibility with Edge as far as if you got that request, hey, we don't actually like this. We want to go a different way and it's, it's going to be this much more work. [00:28:01] Speaker B: We take. You take something like a nap, right? So or you take something like a, like a, whatever just, just a, a list of articles or something like that. And you're used to getting it a certain way in, in, in aem. A lot of times the only way to, to deliver the site performantly and in a way that is going to be, is going to stand up to abuse is to really lean into your cash tier. And, and by really leaning into your cash tier you're, you're essentially giving up a lot of what am is so powerful for because it's got all these connections and services and things that it can, it can do. But when you say all right, I know it's going to break if I lean into it, so I'm going to have to really just get very good at writing, writing fastly or whatever. My CDN tier happens to be writing code to really have heavily leverage that to try to make it quick. But even still it's not necessarily going to be performing perform it when it renders the page. And I think that's the, that's the difference. You get a lot of that performance for free in doing an edge delivery style. And you're not, and you're not always thinking of what's my poor publish server going to do when it reaches this request. [00:29:20] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good point too. I know and this is one of the main takeaways I've had just in our discussions about edge delivery services as well is, and I know Tad, you've spoke on it quite a bit, the out of the box scores and performance for edge delivery service and how impressive that is as, as far as again a potential company or somebody that's looking at it from the outside going well, you know, our site right now is doing pretty good. We have X, Y and Z for our numbers. We're pretty happy with those. And you go well we can put those all well above what you're at now just by switching to edge delivery services. What, what is, what is the makeup of that or how do they achieve that? [00:30:04] Speaker B: That's that. So Sean, you want to so that, that, because that's something that we, we, we get a bunch is people saying well so is it like, is it just caching? Like why is it so good at rendering your page? Like what makes it so good? And like I can talk about some of it from, from an image optimization level because that, that part of it is wonderful because, because that's Something that we've spent tons of just brain effort trying to, trying to do with AM where you say good. Well I've got these images and users keep uploading them or they come in from the product information system and they. And next thing you know they're 4,000 by 3,000 images and they just next. Why is this page loading in 16 seconds? Well, it's because I failed, I failed to think about when users would do such and such and next thing you know you've got these 16 meg jpeg images of a product loading and it's optimizing a page like that is dead simple on edge delivery. It basically you, you have to actively work to mess it up. It's difficult to screw it up. [00:31:12] Speaker A: Yeah, seems like, seems like you, you can go as big as you want and it will optimize the, the image for you. The only thing is if you go too small then that's where you're going to see the problems. And so you know, it's kind of a cool place when you're encouraging your, your content people to go ahead and use the highest quality image that you can. You know. So that's a really nice thing. I think that comes out of the box with EDS is no put in that bigger image. It will be optimized and it'll be. [00:31:45] Speaker B: Perfect for the, for, for, for the. [00:31:46] Speaker A: Web, you know, in all media also all the different media sizes. It's going to spit, spit all of that out in a picture tag with sources and everything's all set. And so that's a huge one for performance. [00:32:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:32:00] Speaker A: The other thing I wanted to point out was it's also easy to kind of keep that performance in check. [00:32:08] Speaker B: Right. [00:32:08] Speaker A: Because you can write checks that go ahead and, and check and test every iteration that you put through code wise on the site. So you're able to kind of see performance challenges before they become problems in production. That's right. And so as you're going through this development process, you know it's automated and set up to go ahead and check those Lighthouse scores for you as you're going. In my experience it made it really easy to isolate and find problems as they were coming up in development rather than finding them in production after the fact. [00:32:44] Speaker C: Interesting. What's been either of you, what's been your biggest. I can't believe this does that moment or I had no idea that was a possibility. Again from previous work with AM to again this new tool and product coming out. What's been one of those aha moments of wow, that's really impressive. I mean I know saying that being able to put data and images and videos within and not having to worry about are they going to render correctly, are they going to slow down the page load times, are they going to break something outside of that, has there been anything else where you went wow, I can't believe they figured out how to implement this. [00:33:23] Speaker B: So I'll say one while you're thinking of one Sean. So one of them is that. Is that. So AEM still has a bunch of use cases that is really good at. Sure. It's got a lot of. So I mean got a form server which is great for serving up forms. A lot of businesses that are not transacting things online are transacting things in the form of forms. [00:33:48] Speaker C: Right. [00:33:49] Speaker B: AM's got a very powerful set of form services. That's one thing you've got AEM assets which is, which is arguably, you know, it's, it, it's either the best or you know, in a, in a, in a. In the top three always of best asset management systems available on the planet. And so if you're, if you've got difficult asset management stuff where you've got hundreds or thousands or millions of things that your company is developing that need to be categorized in a taxonomy and organized in some way and then displayed. AEM is fabulous at that. And the way that it indexes and searches it is only getting better. It's got natural language search built into it now. It's really great. So one of the aha moments for me is that so the way that it's sold right now you get this super flexible front end of. Of edge delivery which you really do want to use that as much as you can because why take forever making a website these days when there's so many other things to do to. For your web presence you don't have to spend all your money just making the website. Let's make the website quick and then work on optimizing journeys and, and you know, getting data into a customer data platform and selling stuff and, and you know, generative stuff agent agentic AI agents for things like there's all kinds of other things to do besides just making a website. Let's make the website fast. But for everything else that you need power for, you've got it there because it sells with AM assets out of the box. So you, you've got, you see. So if you need something powerful you need, you'll see you need a content fragment or an experience fragment for something and it's Best to do that in, in that model. You want the AMS managed taxonomy for, for a way to handle. I mean taxonomy is sexy. That was the, was one of the things that what's name from. From Mar said, right. So it's like you might think that all this other agentic AI is the sexy stuff, but really getting your taxonomy straight, that's really sexy. So, so an AM is a great way to manage that stuff. So anyway, I think to me the ease with which that's integrated into edge delivery is fab. That was one of these things that I thought was going to be a lot harder than it was in implementing the site. [00:36:01] Speaker C: Excellent. What about yourself, Sean? [00:36:05] Speaker A: So for me, you know, I had quite a few aha moments. One of them kind of being understanding that like the document that I'm building, you know, like in Microsoft Word or in document authoring, understanding and figuring out that that is literally just going to be translated over into the web as HTML. That was like, oh, wow, look at this. And so start creating some Excel sheets. And I found out that when I went to the URL for those, it was JSON. And so kind of all the lights started going off for me and I was like, aha. This is such a great way of developing from the, from a front end perspective because I can go about things and engineer things so creatively and so kind of the versatile, like being versatile and being able to pivot. I think that that was my big aha moment. Throughout my career I've worked a lot with product people and clients as well, you know, and so, you know, when you're building on a CMS for instance, they'll have ideas of how they want this, this thing to look when they author it. And so a lot of my work was going into building on the tool that would just make that possible, you know, put a drop down all the different select options, debug all of that. It was so much different. When developing for this, I just create a list. Those are all my options in the front end. Guess what? Query select. Oh, look at that. There's the options. I've got them, they're set up. And so you're literally just authoring the document in the way that it's going to show up on, on, on your website and on the web, you know, and so kind of got the wheels turning there for me. And so that was kind of my big aha, you know, gotcha. Like I can do this. This is cool, right? [00:38:05] Speaker B: And, and, and the raw speed that that engenders is infectious. But it's also a little bit mind boggling like, like, okay, like you said, how long it took you to just kind of get in and be able to finally get dangerous in AEM when you were first brought in, right? And that's been a lot of my experience too when like starting up a new project when somebody says all right, good, well can we see a mockup of how this might look when this is, when this is up and you're like trying to generate something and then, and, and then from our end trying to get environments ready to be able to just show something, right? The amount of effort that it takes to get a, a workable page with a workable navigation and layout and stuff like that is. And just to get a build working when you're, when your build might take a half an hour to run just to, just to gen out a build, right? And then iterate on that just how long do things take? It means that if you want something that looks like something, you're looking at weeks and weeks before you finally have a mock up that looks pretty good, right? Just the fact that like we've done a couple of POCs now where we went from, hey, let's try to model this AEM site in edge delivery. And we started from there and then four days later there's a page that looks exactly. Well, I think I lost it on there. That looks exactly like, like the new thing. Sorry about that. No problem, I paused. [00:39:38] Speaker C: No, that's a great point you're making there too, Tad. I'm like because of just trying to make an MVP or a proof of concept of this is what this looks like, right? It doesn't even have a functionality, but this is just what it looks like. [00:39:50] Speaker B: That's right. [00:39:51] Speaker C: With EDS it sounds like you can get that look and feel rather quickly, right? [00:39:58] Speaker B: The whole website like, like it almost is almost like the same speed as it would take to like do something up in like you know, XD or Figma or something like that. Like if you take the, the amount of time that it takes, like you'd almost have to go FIGMA first with AM because you're never going to get iterate on the design fast enough, right? Whereas you can kind of just bypass that whole Figma idea with this. [00:40:20] Speaker A: You know, that was a big gotcha. Like a big wow for me was when doing development and working with designers and you know, PM's being able to just go to a stage branch and I know we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier just by changing my URL and putting the branch name in there. I can send that link off to who is affected and who wants to, you know, review this and give me the okay, I can send that off in a few seconds. And I remember throughout my career wishing I had that capability because, you know, I had to go through all the trouble of pushing my code up, you know, deploying it out to a staging environment and going through all of that to, to try and just get a link out to get, okay, that looks good. And sometimes you're making a change that's nothing, it's just a small change, you know. And so I remember being just amazed that with EDS it was so easy to just change that branch name, send it right over and get the okay. So it kind of made things move so much faster, not just in development, but also just in getting things checked back and forth and communicating. [00:41:29] Speaker B: I mean, especially just for the idea of a branch like this. I like, because I think that sometimes people have a hard time wrapping their wits around how many things that changes. Because like as an example, in in AM Land. So there was, there was. So we, we did work for big, big TV brand. And one of the things that we had to do for them was, was this idea. They wanted the idea of being able to basically do what you're saying right there. Of, of there's a group that's working on something and they want to be able to show it off independent of what other people are working on. And so, so because the whole idea AM is, is so big and, and this is the way that most things, I mean, optimizely works the same way as this in terms of like, you've got a fixed set of environments. You don't have infinite environments. You have a fixed set of environments. So if you're going to go and say, all right, well, we're working on this crazy new idea for the nav or working on this crazy new video player, it's going to break everything on the old side. But, but, you know, this is my new video player. And so if you're doing that, you, you want an environment to then show something off to a stakeholder. Like, and you say so like this, do you like it like this? And they can say, no, I prefer it like this. You can change it. And all that's happening while the rest of the development stream is happening. [00:42:37] Speaker A: And while you're on the call, right, call. And they're like, I don't like this. And you're like, tap, tap, tap, tap, get push. [00:42:44] Speaker C: Right, right. [00:42:46] Speaker B: Your screen right with am, that's, that's very difficult. I mean, I mean they're, There are some. I would, I don't want to poo poo it too much because there are some tools for AM to be able to do front end pushes quickly, but the infrastructure required to do that, you basically need a full environment. And to have a shared environment like that that I can send somebody a URL to. You can't send somebody a URL to my laptop. So that, so you, so you need to have these independently spun up environments. They have to be big enough to have all your test content on it. So it's so like on, in aml, we ended up having these like massive like multi terabyte AWS instances for individual development squads that we would spin up. It took, it was like eight months worth of development to create all the gear to spin this up. [00:43:32] Speaker C: Wow. [00:43:33] Speaker B: You get this for free, like right now. And like you said, it's like another whole advance in that. You could just say, hey, you want to see something here? I just pushed a new branch here, refresh it. While we were on the call. [00:43:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I was about to say it's even helped collaboratively, like with my fellow engineers. You know, I have this problem. Sean, you have any ideas? You know, so instead of me trying to explain what's in my mind to him, I can just spin up a POC real quick and send him the link and be like, this is what. [00:44:01] Speaker B: I think you should do. [00:44:02] Speaker A: And it's kind of also helped in that aspect because it's just so versatile. You're. Look, this is what I think you should do. Oh, well, I made an update. Okay, pull that down and have a look. [00:44:13] Speaker B: Oh, cool. [00:44:14] Speaker A: All right, we've got it. [00:44:15] Speaker B: It's set. [00:44:16] Speaker A: You know, this is, this has also. [00:44:18] Speaker B: Been the case too with, with, I think it's, it's going to transform Adobe support. My thought, because, because this is the other thing too, is that in dealing with folks at Adobe, there's been a number of times where I've said I'm trying to do this. I feel like I'm an idiot. How come I can't get this to work? And then somebody from Adobe's like, I, I got an idea here, I just gave you a pr and then, and then I try it out locally and I'm like, okay, good, that's good, we're done. [00:44:44] Speaker A: Change this or that, you know, like, well, I like it like this a little bit better, but hey, still the, the ease of use and sharing with each other and, and you know, working through those, those problems, I think that, that not having to worry about all of the staging and all of that aspect of things, it just makes it so powerful. [00:45:05] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it kind of puts, puts different disciplines on the same playing level at a certain degree of being able, like you're saying, Sean, to communicate those ideas and flesh out differences of. I'm not exactly thinking of it this way. I want it to kind of look. And even if you're demoing it for someone that doesn't necessarily develop on it, you can give them their vision much quicker to where again we're talking about cutting down cost not just with the service itself, but the adjunct points that are plugging into it. Right. And everyone else that's going, you know, this used to take X amount of time to author or publish or get assets into. What does that look like going forward as far as kind of making that language barrier a little less tall to get over for employees and co workers to go, hey, I need to talk to you about this. Do you, do you find it'll maybe open up that line of communication more easily and maybe, you know, websites and pages are going to, you know, again, maybe we'd hoped for this in the past but we couldn't get there. We got as close as we could and now maybe we're exceeding expectations to where. Maybe that opens up the possibilities more going forward to where what traditionally worked. Now you have the ability to go, no, I know I can shoot higher and I know we can get it. And it's going to be again optimized. It's going to be perform formative. What does that look like going forward? [00:46:31] Speaker B: Well, I've got one idea. One, one idea is this, is that so? Yes, it totally does lower the barrier to me. So one of the, one of the things that it does, I feel is that, so I've been, I've been in a bunch of projects where, where an organization got AEM and they're like, okay, this thing does everything is amazing. And so AEM's got terrific multi site management capabilities. It does like so many different things with respect to being able to integrate multi sites and manage lots of different sites from one instance. So cool. So you can do that. But the effort is high getting things into aem. So you buy aem, you're like, okay, good, we're going to stick everything in aem. And then by the time you're five years into that journey of having aam, then, then you're like, you're already. Things are Getting stale already and you're still only like, you know, two, three sites into migrating sites into aem. And then already you're like, okay, yeah, we, now we need to upgrade and this thing's getting a little old in the tooth and you haven't even gotten to this place where originally you were trying to get all your sites under one roof. So to me that's one thing where you can say good, well now we can finally tackle this whole thing of like, let's get everything under one roof. Because every, every business I've ever been a part of has the main CMS and a bunch of dangly Drupal WordPress, HubSpot, Joomla. Static hand coded artisanal organic websites, you know what I mean, that are, right. [00:48:02] Speaker C: That don't necessarily unfold quickly into that setup or process. [00:48:06] Speaker B: We got them in and they're, you know, from 2011 and they're still sitting there and they're still going to be sitting there after the next upgrade too. [00:48:14] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:48:14] Speaker B: Because it's too hard to get them in. So, so that's one thing to me that, that, that you can accelerate with all this. You say good, well let's not just tackle the primary site, let's get them all in. Like one of our, one of our, one of our customers right now is busy like oh good, well now we can get our blog in. Excellent. We always wanted to have a blog. So now good, now let's get the blog. Cause it was easy. And here we are two sprints in and they're already about ready to, to, to roll things onto this blog. They went from like design to, to, to mockups in that length of time it never would have happened on traditional am. And so, so, so, so this is to me, that's one of the things that it can enable. Is, is, is, is finally that vision of like you know, managing one thing with one platform. I think that's to me that's, that's, that's the best way to go. [00:48:59] Speaker C: It's good. Another question I had was, and, and just thinking about what you said earlier and again the robust nature of AEM itself and typically being geared towards say a larger company, a global company somewhere that you're needing all of the tools and resources, right. If you're mom and Pop's ice cream store in, you know, the middle of nowhere, you're not going to set up an AEM instance and start running all of this. It's just, it's, it's using a hand grenade to take out a gopher you know what I mean? It's just a little too much firepower. But with edge delivery services, my question would be what, what size companies, what size clients typically could benefit from edge delivery services? Or is there a limit? You know, if you are a, a global corporation that has presence in multi countries, is edge delivery services powerful enough to serve up your content? [00:49:59] Speaker A: I would say yes for sure. Adobe.com is currently on EDS and so you look at that website and 40 plus languages across the entire world. And so with that one, when we started building out the component library for that we really had to think about from an authoring perspective we had to think about how that was going to affect the whole planet because you have people all across the globe that are using that, that are going to be using this tool, you know, and so when you were approaching it it's like okay, so what is this going to look like in Japan? Etc? And so I, I think it's, it's a solution that can be used by, you know, almost anyone. [00:50:51] Speaker B: Yep, I agree there, I mean to me the, the, the low end of that is a lot of times only limited by, I mean I don't want to say it but licensing cost because I think, I think previously I would have said that the low end is licensing cost but also team size because there is a, there is a, there's a bottom end of like how big of a team can actually reliably support an AEM site. And you can't just necessarily have an AEM site with just a product owner and a developer and a couple UI people and some authors like that. That won't work because you actually, that this person is going to be underwater and it won't be successful and then next thing you know you're going to be pulling in a partner like us to be able to full time run your AEM site. Which a lot of times that is the role that, that I've ended up playing is, is, is basically the, the to, to. To. To cover the fact that it's just, it's just too much. Whereas at this point really it just comes down to licensing because, because you know you can run, you can run a blog off of this just from your elbow. Just say good, I, you know, we designed it and now we're just going to keep it up. There's no operations overhead really. Whereas with, even with AM cloud service there was significant operations overhead. There's very little operations overhead with this, this is a very low overhead system. So, so, so I feel like to Sean's point too. You can go really big with this. You can, you can do a multi locale, multi language. You can go everywhere with this. There's a little bit of gear that you're going to have to then do when, when it, when you talk about doing something like let's say you got a presence in China, that's, that's more, that's more work, that's more infrastructure and that'll be a, that'll be a topic for this year's adapt to. But, but as long as you're not doing that, there's very little operational overhead. So you could run this on a small site, you can run this on. [00:52:43] Speaker C: A giant site when it sounds like too, it comes from a place of wanting to spread that market reach too for Adobe, right? With, with again if, if you don't need AEM traditional setup and you want to use edge delivery services, that's an availability. Maybe again fee of entry might be a little bit of a barrier again depending on scope and size. But it sounds like they're trying to open it up and make it more accessible across the board for more use cases that maybe previously weren't really incorporated into AEM just because of its nature and its design. [00:53:24] Speaker B: I'd say that. But I think, I think also. So if you, if you like, if you go to Adobe Summit, you look at the number of products that Adobe has in the marketing space, it's just like, it's like a, it's just an arsenal. It's like, it's like Arnold Schwarzenegger Commando. It's like it, like that's, that's what you feel like. You know, everything's strapped on. Right? And, but the, but the problem is, is, and this is where it gets kind of sad is where if you, if you know you have that level of gear all over you and then all you get to use is the pocket knife because that's all you got, you know, a chance to use. It's, it's, it's rough. Like if you know that AEM does things like, like multi, multi region variations on content or take these new like generative variations of like I want to try five different things and run an A and run ABCD test on them and stuff like that number of, number of shops that just simply like man, I'm just trying to get the index page to load decently. I'm trying to get, I'm trying to make this thing not buggy. Like there's no time for a lot of that crazy marketing ideas that people might want to experiment on which is the essence of marketing. You know what I mean? [00:54:34] Speaker C: Right. [00:54:34] Speaker B: Nobody has all the answers at first. So you want to just like do marketer stuff like say good, you know, Sean, can you make me up, you know, five different versions of this and we'll just try them. Like you don't have enough time for that. You don't have 75 sprints for that. Like you want to. Sometimes you look at it. Why I know we want to run a promotion this summer, so let's do it now. And to me that's what you get time for when you're running with it with something that doesn't take forever to build. [00:55:01] Speaker C: Yeah. And edge delivery services sounds like that solves that or makes it much more accessible. [00:55:08] Speaker B: It's more accessible. It's definitely more accessible. I mean all that to be said, we're painting very rosy picture of edge delivery right now. Which the thing is it's very rosy. There's stuff to know. There's definitely stuff to know in terms of how to lay out a site, how to approach a site. Like Sean was saying, it's a totally different mindset. [00:55:30] Speaker A: To expand on that a little bit. It's pretty agnostic to having a set way of doing things. And so when you're building on your front end using eds, you're going to be able to be pretty creative about how you approach it. And that's from an authoring or development perspective because isn't opinionated, you know, and so you, when, when you're starting to build a new element, for instance, and you're gonna set it up and you have a new block, it's pretty open ended. You're like, okay, there's some specific ways that you know, you can go about it, but you can be pretty creative also. And so it's, it's great in a, it's great in that aspect. But then also you have to think you're going to be working with authors and developers alike to, you know, come up with those solutions because you're ultimately, it's on you to come up with them. [00:56:32] Speaker B: That's right. [00:56:33] Speaker A: And so when it comes to like creating a new hero, for instance, you know, you're going to say, hey, author, how, how do you want to author this? So instead of giving them a tool that does it for them, you're like, hey, how, how would this work best for you? And then you're able to go in on the development side and be creative about how you make, you know, make the dreams come true. [00:56:54] Speaker B: That's right. At the same time like so it's, it's completely not opinionated in a lot of areas, but I to me opinionated in some of the right areas where, where it's, it's a little bit like you know, having, having the wingman that makes sure you stay off the booze when you're at a party. Like, you know. No, not that one. Yeah, don't drink that. Like you keep, Can I keep you on the rails? Because like things like, like, like to make sure you're not nesting stuff because it's going to kill performance because everybody like the number of times you've been in an AM author and somebody's got a container and they got a can inside a container inside of a container with a table inside that, this and then an accordion that pops out of the table. You're like 11 layers deep and just loading the page makes the author crash half the time. And that happens. I mean that was recently happened for one of our customers, but it's happened. I've seen it happen a bunch of times. Because there's nothing keeping you from doing self destructive things in a. Where. Whereas, whereas there are some guard rails and edge delivery like. Nah, nah. I mean you can, you can, you can force the issue in some cases, but you shouldn't do that. [00:58:02] Speaker C: Have you found any, any significant points of pain or bottlenecks from AEM development that you've done in the past had or Sean, that you want to do an edge delivery services that isn't necessarily a one for one or there's not the same functionality or development? [00:58:28] Speaker B: There's a lot of places where there isn't a one for one. There's a lot of times, I mean, I mean Sean, Sean said this a couple different ways and I don't know that we can restate this enough too though that, that you got to be willing to think of things a little bit differently. [00:58:42] Speaker C: Fair enough. [00:58:43] Speaker B: Because sometimes you come in and say well how can I do this? How can I do that? Right? What, what if. Because I'm, I'm used to being able to do this and if I to do that in am, Are you saying that I can't, you're saying I can't do that in edge delivery? Like. [00:58:56] Speaker C: Right, right. [00:58:58] Speaker B: I'm saying you don't want to. [00:59:01] Speaker A: That's what I was about to say. Yes, maybe you don't want to because originally when you were going to build something, you know, you had to do this, that, this and the, and the other to make it happen. And so kind of Adjusting that mindset and looking at it from a different angle I think is one of the important things in making this journey to using this the, the best way that you can. I think another mindset that you should adopt is simplicity. Keeping simplicity in mind. You're not going to want to make things as complex as you might think they need to be right off the bat. [00:59:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:59:41] Speaker A: There's a very simple solution that's going to be easy for everyone to absorb and understand. And so you know, taking the time to, to try and, and keeping the focus on keeping things simple I think is another mindset going into this that you're, you're going to need versus you know, using traditional AEM or even something completely different. You know, there's so many solutions out there. [01:00:07] Speaker C: Yeah. It makes me wonder too with, with going forward with EDS and, and working with it and getting to understand, oh, maybe we did over engineer this previously on, you know, an instance of aem, does it possibly give developers that are going to work with both go and actually perform and function better on AEM itself? You know, a traditional setup from working with EDS tab. Do you find that to be the case or do you, do you think that's a possibility of maybe with the garbage translate a little bit? [01:00:41] Speaker B: May not be the best answer. But, but the, but what I found too is folks that after they've been in this edge delivery world for a bit, they're like okay, I gotta go do something in AEM and like I'd rather do almost anything else besides go and do this thing in aem. We need to like, okay, I guess set up this model and I gotta write some Java code to do this to set thing up to go behind the things that I can put the thing on top of it so that I can get this out to the author. And you're like nah, oh, I forgot to do a dispatcher rule in front of that. So there's, you know, you're four layers deep of this stuff that you wrote just to get this one little dialogue out and you're like I didn't really, I didn't really like that too much. So, but, but on the other hand to use AEM specifically for what it's good at to me makes it more entertaining then to develop those things in am because then you're like oh, now we're doing some heavy lifting stuff that AAM is great at. And so let's, let's. Then you lead into that, then you, then you don't feel like you're spending way too Much time just to get some pixels on the screen. Yeah, because EdgeLove's super fast at getting pixels on the screen. You want this, you want that, you want like. And it renders fast. Like as an example, Sean, so you made a page recently for one of our proof of concepts that was a real design heavy page with an MP4 background. And we never tested this thing lighthouse wise. I just tested it recently to compare with another proof of concept we were doing. I think it's lighthouse 99. Despite the fact that it's. It is loading its largest contentful paint is an MP4 thing fires up in. It's like, it's like a second and change to be able to get the contentful paint on that. So it's like you wouldn't, you wouldn't do that in a. So that. So drawn pixels on the screen is fast. And then you say, good. Well, I need this thing to index a whole ton of PDFs or I need this thing to do a bunch of asset stuff or do a bunch of workflows on inbound assets, run a Photoshop filter on them and then spit them into like. Good, great. That's like real, you know, heavy duty brute AM stuff. And then that's makes that stuff for me more fun. [01:02:52] Speaker C: Interesting. [01:02:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, we're at about an hour, so I think that's a good time to wrap up. I think that one thing to point folks to is, is and to make sure everybody knows is you can get involved and start working with this right now. And, and you don't need a license, you don't need to be an existing customer, you don't need any of that to just start getting your hands dirty, play with it and see how you like it. And then if you want to do something more complicated, then you can talk to somebody like us. But. Www.aem.live log in, check it out. It'll tell you how to get started with your own boilerplate project and you can get involved, see what it's all about. [01:03:31] Speaker C: Excellent. Well, Tad, Sean, thank you both for your time and insights into edge delivery services, and I look forward to talking about this more. [01:03:40] Speaker B: All right, great. [01:03:42] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:03:42] Speaker B: Thanks guys. See you guys. [01:03:45] Speaker C: Take care.