Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Hey, welcome to Arboret digital experience. This is episode eight. This is the Adobe Summit 2024 recap.
[00:00:18] And as you can see, I'm not in my usual place. I am still in my hotel room, still in Las Vegas. I haven't gone home yet. Never mind that. I haven't even briefed my team really on what's happened at Adobe summit. And I wanted to cut this video while all the info is still fresh in my mind because this particular Adobe summit, with no hyperbole is there was more released, talked about and slow dripped or fast dripped or fire hosed that materially disrupts things that we've all been doing for the last decade or so.
[00:01:02] And I wanted to encapsulate them in some sort of an understandable way. So if you, this audience here, people I'm talking to are developers, architects, DevOps guys, tech leaders, people like that that have worked in the Adobe experience delivery space, because you should know about some of the changes that are happening because the conference started out as this basically adobe framing it all around generative AI, which is the whole chat, GPT, firefly, dolly type thing where you type in a thing and it generates an image for you or generates a video or whatever, because that's all, that's the buzz. And they're like, oh, you gotta do. The whole theme of this conference is how what Adobe is doing in this new world of AI and in the field of content generation, Generative AI is the most ridiculously disruptive force and technology. And it's completely changing the way that people generate and create content. The entire content creation, from ideation to content briefs to getting it through into production, so forth, it's been completely disrupted by Generative AI. That's totally not what I'm going to be talking about right now because there is a complete other disruptive force which I feel like flew under the radar for a lot of people in terms of what they're seeing, because what's flashy is like generative AI is flashy. The fact that you can go and you type in a thing and it goes in and makes something, and then previously you had to go enslave over it and just go, oh my gosh, I got to do all these little things now you don't. That's wild.
[00:02:57] But from a tech implementers perspective, there are some other disruptions that I want to talk about. So here, if you got a sec, go strap some headphones in, go for a half an hour walk. I'm going to try to summarize this in not too long so that I can at least give you what I've been mulling over because there's some big stuff that has shifted that may shift your technology plans.
[00:03:30] So what I'm going to talk about right now are am sites, assets, dynamic media and edge delivery. And that sounds boring, but you got to hang with me for a second here.
[00:03:50] So if I were great at scripting and so forth, I'd probably like save my punch lines for the very end, but I'm just going to get the punchline out of the way at the very beginning. Right now, the mega disruptive force right now is the ridiculous speed of development, delivery composition and flexibility of edge delivery.
[00:04:27] And as a DevOps guy, I'm probably somebody who has made their entire living on servers and blinking lights and switches and routers and load balancers and backup plans and disaster recovery scenarios and all that sort of stuff. It is, it is completely changing the way that you even think about how to compose a website, how it's put together, how you're delivering it, your asset storage, your asset delivery, your components, your mobile plans, all that stuff.
[00:05:18] Let me explain. So previously, and for like a very long time now in Internet land, like basically for, oh gosh, basically half of the lifetime of the entire public Internet, there has been, there has been AEM CQ, which is served from servers. And this has been the way that we have develop things.
[00:05:47] It hasn't changed. Every summit you come and you go, good, what's new?
[00:05:53] What are the things that I need? What are the new features that are coming out? But the one thing that hasn't changed is you're going to develop on things that are going to be deployed on these servers. Now, some people have changed things which really are subtle shifts going from an on premise system to the cloud, or going from cloud systems that you manage to a cloud service. But the way that it's all being delivered is all essentially the same.
[00:06:25] You're either you're trying to take advantage of a wysIwyg, what you see is what you get. Gooey experience of developing content, which is all done with components which are served from a Java application server and are all stored in a big content repository and so forth. And there's all these skills around that that we've developed over the years of how to care and feed and manage and develop all those components. And we all know that it takes a really long time to do a bunch of things. We know how to estimate these projects, we know all this kind of stuff.
[00:07:04] And edge delivery is turning a bunch of this on its head and it's giving flexibility to things and preposterous speed of rollout that is.
[00:07:23] I don't know that I can overstate how much this changes.
[00:07:29] So, okay, so just to give an example of this, just to really kind of set the stage. So, and some of this I've, I've known bits of, but I can't talk about publicly because it was never said publicly, but it was said publicly at Adobe summit. So now I can talk about it. So, so Adobe themselves, right? So we've had, we've had all these iterations of things that we've been, you know, ushered along to go and do things like AEM managed services am as a cloud service. These are different, different services having to do with Adobe hosting and delivery. Okay.
[00:08:09] Adobe.com has been on self hosted an 65 all this time because it is rock solid and stable, which is an option that a lot of companies have also stayed with over the years. They have not gone to a third party or Adobe managed setup. They've done it themselves because DevOps is hard.
[00:08:36] There's a lot that goes into maintaining and making something really stable and keeping it fast. And if it goes down like you take Adobe.com and how much goes through Adobe.com dot, there's a lot that goes through Adobe.com dot creative cloud members. Now it's a subscription model and everybody's buying the things online. If that goes down for ten minutes, heads are going to roll. Right.
[00:08:59] So they haven't moved.
[00:09:02] But as a result, also you're dealing with the content velocity and all the things that go into AEM 6.5, which is, is not that fast.
[00:09:13] And developing new experiences on AEM 6.5 is not that fast. It actually takes a lot of labor.
[00:09:21] And then once you, it's not very conducive to massive change also. So because any, any project takes a bunch of developers and a bunch of time to be able to implement. If you look at any, look at any Adobe experience manager project that I've estimated, and nothing gets done in less than three months.
[00:09:47] Nothing. Absolutely nothing. So at this point though, so edge delivery services has been kind of slow rolled out. It was kind of released to the public really last year. It's been, you know, a bunch of us knew about it, but it, but in terms of like, what was it? It was, it was in the same category as generative AI in that it's a neat toy. You can't use it for anything serious, but it's a neat toy.
[00:10:17] It has gone way out of being a neat toy to the point where everything in Adobe, all adobe sites basically have migrated to edge delivery service.
[00:10:37] And they've done that at a shocking speed with really good results. In terms of how much do the authors like authoring on it, how fast can they make changes, how fast can they develop new experiences, how fast can they go and change some piece of the UI, the SLA's for how fast they can do it are just ridiculously fast.
[00:11:02] And the fact that they were able to make that whole transformation care for absurd amounts of traffic easily and were able to do it over the course, really the entire transformation, it started with the Adobe blog and moved forward.
[00:11:19] Now there's only vestiges, small vestiges of pages of content that are still being served off of the old 6.5 and everything else. Here we've got experience league, helpX, dot adobe.com, comma, all the documentation, business, dot adobe.com, the blog, all these other things, they're all being served off of edge delivery service. And so let me take a step back for a second. So for anybody who isn't caught up on edge delivery service, what it is, how it's different, all that sort of thing. So Edge delivery service is a, you'd say a collection of services. Edge delivery service, it's for delivery of content. You can plug in a bunch of different ways to get content into this. It's extraordinarily fast, extraordinarily resilient, and for the most part is based off of the premise that you are using documents that you feed it. And it can be fed with simple markdown like GitHub Markdown can be fed by Google Drive documents and spreadsheets, and be fed by SharePoint word docs and Excel spreadsheets and so forth. And the output that it then produces is optimized to be the very fastest sites on the entire Internet. Start out from a lighthouse score of 100, where it's just preposterously fast and the way that it is then developed too, because of the fact you've got this total separation of concerns of the content, how you're preparing it, and then the display. The display is all done with commodity JavaScript and CSS. You basically, because with an AEM site, you gotta know in order to deliver an AEM site, you need a minimum of like five languages, maybe six, to be able to deliver it. Where you have to have Java, sometimes JSP sitely CSS JavaScript, then you have the other languages of being able to then get it out, which are all the configuration that goes into the delivery tier which is the dispatcher. So you got all the Apache configuration and then the dispatcher configuration which is all the cache control is its own language which is these dispatcher any files. So that's a little bit of talent that you need to maintain in order to get your average AEM site out.
[00:14:04] Many sites need more than this, right? But that's a bunch to learn. Edge delivery service needs JavaScript and CSS. That's all you need. And that JavaScript and CSS is not this AEM core components, super domain specific stuff where you can't even learn it on your own.
[00:14:22] Edge delivery you can learn on your own, you can try it on your own, you can even launch a site on your own. So it's super conducive to onboarding new developers and getting the talent that you need to be able to go and launch a site really fast.
[00:14:37] So here's what this, so it'd be one thing if you couldn't get a lot of, so in the beginning, yes, its feature set wasn't, didn't, didn't have enough where, where you could take a major website project, say good, well let me think about making this website project on Edge delivery. And you're like eh, no, it's still kind of lacking a lot of features, but they have been so the very most talented people, so many talented people on Adobe. But some of the top guys, including like basically the Doctor Terrell of, of AEM, like the inventor of this in the first place, theyre all working on edge delivery. So weve got some absolutely brilliant minds in Adobe land working on solving problems of edge delivery. And theres some bright, fast agile solutions for making sites now of rapidly taking an old site, ingesting it into edge delivery, throwing it into documents and then launching it. Now here's the other thing.
[00:15:52] All right, so now I can let me get into things that have changed in AEM land or in digital experience land and things that were released which now further feed into the disruption that this then causes. Okay, so in terms of things that were released with AEM sites, probably the biggest thing that changed with AEM sites or the biggest release is the universal editor. Universal editor has been an open secret for a while. It's been in beta and pre release and so forth. What the universal editor is, is an interface that allows you to do headful implementations like regular core components implementations. It allows you to do headless implementations. If you do, you do a react app or something like that. But it also allows you to do edge delivery service deployments directly in AEM.
[00:16:52] So it gives you the flexibility of being able to, let's just say, let's just say you've got a website and you, you've got a ton of workflows already built in. You've got a lot that you've already done and you like the way that you're managing the content. You just wish it was faster to reskin roll out new pages, do new uis, and you want the actual page delivery speed to be faster. Okay, you can basically then take that content that you have in AEM and use the universal editor to deploy it straight to edge delivery service. And have you basically at that point, just to be super clear, you're bypassing, you have, there's no publish tier, dispatcher tier, or publish dispatcher CDN on top of that. You're not using that part of the stack at all. You're publishing it. There's basically a connector that in AEM that just goes and you say, good, here's my project. Here's my edge delivery service project. And it goes straight out to edge delivery service. And you can have that stuff running side by side with your other AEM content path by path, which, okay, I just think about this for a second. Just be an architect for a sec. So you're sitting there with a customer and you're like, okay, what are your requirements? Okay, my site has to do this and this and this and this and this. It has to be able to connect to this. It has to be able to connect to this.
[00:18:25] But for the most part, most of our site is these parts and these parts and these parts. You build the entire solution based on some of the most complicated requirements that you have. Because you could say, oh, I would love for you to go and use this simple service over here. But you've got a couple of pages that really have these backend connectivity requirements. Maybe that's only three pages of the site that have these backends connectivity requirements. But you're going to design your entire solution around the fact that you've got three pages that need to talk to a SQL server for one thing, to pull an event list, and you've got one other thing that needs to talk to some on premise, whatever or some form or something like that. So you said, well, I guess we can't move to the cloud because we've got these backend connectivity requirements. Hey, if you're running on AM cloud service now, you can architect a solution where all of the pages of your site that don't have all these crazy technical requirements. They're all pushed out to edge delivery, either document based or using the universal editor.
[00:19:36] Then the parts that really are like, they are really impractical to move. Fine. Because in some cases, anything is technically possible. Just about anything is technically possible besides humans flying by themselves, not launched out of a catapult. But there's a difference between technically possible and politically viable. And in some cases you say, good, well, can we open up this one thing to the Internet? And then the chief security officer is like, absolutely not. It's never going to happen. You get, well, then we have to use our VPN connection, and we're going to have to serve this page out of an AEM publisher. Okay. Serve that page out of an AM publisher. That's one page. The rest of the site can be on edge delivered. So this is where you go. Okay, stuff starting to really, really change here.
[00:20:33] Other things that have been released that make this even more compelling. So in AEM, there's no out of the box instant experimentation that you can do. Basically, you don't need a, you don't need to have a whole Adobe target team in order to be able to do simple a b testing or ABCDeFG testing that's now inbuilt into both the AEM universal editor and into the core edge delivery service product that you can deploy right now, where you can just go and say, I want to run an experiment and a challenger and select a winner out of these three layouts, and just say, layout one, layout two, layout three, layout four, good. Select it, and it'll just go and push it out. There's no coding. I did a lab where we did this in. Like, I had it done in five minutes. It was all done, configured and out in five minutes, and I've never done it before. It was so dead simple. Whereas there's a lot of companies, oh, yeah, we'd love to do a bunch of that a b testing, but then there's all these no inbox setups and so forth that there's like, there's weeks and weeks of project planning and getting developers and all that kind of stuff, whereas now it's just like, like, literally, I could take a couple of these managers that I've talked to who say, who? Tell me I'm not technical. You know what? You're technical enough to do this. You're 100% technical enough to do this. So, so, all right, so you have that end of things.
[00:22:19] Experimentation is amazing. There's some other. So, okay. Fine. I said I wasn't going to talk about Genai. There are a couple of Genai features that are really cool, that are not just floofy background stuff, things like AI driven content variations where you say, all right, what are some different ways that we could lay this out? And you could have Genai go and code you a few different ways that a page could be laid out and then do your bunch of a b testing out of that. You can generate call out images based on a prompt out of Firefly that could be brand specific. Because one of the things. Okay, good, fine. I said I wasn't going to talk about Gene AI, but here I go. So one of the things that they, that they, that they're, that they're launching as part of Firefly is custom models. You've got a foundation model, which is everybody, everybody uses. When you say prompt is all based on, on public domain stuff, then they have your brand models that are only trained on your data and the data never leaks out.
[00:23:22] So if you have, let's just say you're, I don't know, what, a shoe company or your manufacturing company or something like that, you've got a whole bunch of stuff that is yours. You've got logos and assets and you got brand styling and all that kind of stuff. You just want it to train just on this and you don't want it to include anything that looks like a competitor and you don't want it to. So you can have your own models plugged in on top of Firefly and have it generate versions of this where you just say, okay, good, knock out the background. Give me a background that works that's brand specific, that looks like my stuff, and then good fire. And then, so being able to rapidly roll out pages and things like that, that have a bunch of randomware content on that. So that's cool. That's cool.
[00:24:11] So, and then there's, yeah.
[00:24:14] Other, other nifty integrations which are, which are less like, oh, my gosh. Transformative, but. So there's a lot insights. So now, okay, so now I want to pivot a little bit just for a sec. And I want to talk about digital asset management and delivery because this also has the power to completely change how you're going about things. So in the past, we would also have, a lot of times, AEM would, would also contain all of your images. Like, the reason why your AEM instance would be so gigantic is because it would also contain all of your images for.
[00:24:53] And digital assets for everything. Right? So you'd end up with this big author server that was absolutely ginormous. Like sometimes like whatever, like terabytes of space inside of this one computer that has all of your stuff in it. But then once it has all this stuff in it, how are you going to, you're going to have to then duplicate all this data all over the place when you go and try to serve it out. So let's just say you've got a bunch of videos or you have just whatever 10,000 PDF files that have to be, that are all the product manuals for your thing or whatever it is, right? So you're going to have to then let's just say you want to publish this and make it available on your whole website and to other services. So then those tens of thousands of PDF's and images and so forth, you publish them. And then they have to be then available on every last publish server that you have in order to keep yourself highly available.
[00:25:51] You're then copy pasting all of this content. Let's just say you've got four publishers or six publishers or eight publishers something as you're copy pasting this content across all those machines. Look at your footprint right now. Of what? Of how much gear you're having to do just to be able to publish this.
[00:26:09] So the part that's made things difficult is people have said, okay, good, I've got wow, this gear, but I would love to be able to use my assets in this site over here, or I've got Adobe Express and we've trying to make a cool workflow for this over here. We're trying to, you're using workfront over here, or we've got a WordPress blog, or we've got other ways that we're sharing these things over here.
[00:26:35] Once you've got all your assets in one place, you want to share it. But being able to actually distribute them has been really, really trying the whole, so there have been some really neat user interface changes in assets and I'm not even going to go into those right now. The part that really changes the world is dynamic media. So dynamic media is another Adobe product which a lot of times gets plugged onto your, to your am instance or your AM license. And it has the ability to help you serve things out broadly and with the right size and the right bit rate for your videos and things like that. But now what this has the ability to do this whole API so that all of your assets you could serve anywhere as a part of anything, anytime, completely irrespective of whether you're on AM sites. If it's a legacy AM sites instance, if it's edge delivery, if it's anywhere it can get served out. Not only can it just get served out, they've got this whole API based on things like let's say you've got ten different colors of a blouse that you've got.
[00:27:53] The API allows you to go and select punch out backgrounds just in a query string on the image, serve out whatever the 20 or 50 or 100 different variations of the same image. Or let's say you've got different discounts or different languages, text localizations on the image itself. Maybe the image is going out as a part of an email. Maybe you're hyper personalizing this and you want to say, you know, hey Ted, I've got this, this really awesome mountain bike for you and it's 50% off. That image can say, hey, tab on the image that's served out directly out of your AEM assets instance coming from dynamic media. So you make one image once and serve it to everybody with the needs they've got.
[00:28:50] What this does is allows you to completely rethink your entire Internet infrastructure for delivery.
[00:29:02] Because once again, as a architect, I am constantly going, what are the main requirements that you've got for delivery? So, okay guys, we need to have this assets environment here. It needs to be this big, you need to use it over here. So you're going to host this on premise, or the fact that you can serve all of this seamlessly, anywhere, globally from anything totally frees up, like it completely frees you up to be able to design a brilliant new infrastructure.
[00:29:39] So I hope you're getting some of the implications of this because there are sometimes where you've said, good, well this is going to be a year long project to move this thing to Am cloud service from 6.5.
[00:29:57] We're going to have to redo all these different core components or redo all these old Java server pages in am core components and so on and so forth. And it's going to take all this and all this development work.
[00:30:09] These projects of this sort can be massively compressed at this point with edge delivery and the offshoot of that is that, and this is, I think, and this is just, that makes some people I talked to here and it made them pretty scared because they've got big AEM teams. And the good if your projects go super fast, then that's less money for you or something like that. But just think about the fact that from all the years that I've been going to Adobe Summit Adobe releases tools, and they're awesome tools and there are these amazing tools. And then I go back to where we're having to be working and how many of those features are actually going to be implemented in those companies, and it's basically like a microfraction of that because once you've gone through one of these mega AEM upgrades, you just don't have budget and time and bandwidth to be able to deal with. Like, hey, should we do journey optimization and all this experimentation and super personalization and all this other stuff? Like should we do that? Yeah, we should totally do that. We just 100% do not have the budget. We're not Coca Cola, we're not Delta Airlines.
[00:31:25] We don't have the bandwidth and the money to go out and do that.
[00:31:30] So you don't. But if you can get that site done super fast and you've got some now, you've got a little bit of budget and time and bandwidth and people to be able to throw into experimentation, you can dive more into those services. So from Adobe's point of view, you're just going to broaden the number of services that you're able to take advantage of, which is only just going to make your customers experience better and make the returns that you get on it that much better as well.
[00:32:04] Okay, so, man, there's a lot of things that I did not touch on on this.
[00:32:10] As usual, you can count on me for a big blog post that goes into all the different top innovations of various things where I'm going to summarize, I didn't even talk about things like in assets, there's a brand new thing called content hub, which basically is going to essentially replace brand portal. So anybody who's used brand portal, if you've got this problem of having external agencies and people be able to contribute and use assets that you have internally, it's a brand new system for that. There's analytics built into am assets now that it's just changes the world. You've got a whole new search interface, natural language search interface built into AEM assets for finding things. There's a lot of really neat tech that was released, but again, I don't think that there's ever been a time where it's more important to really get yourself skilled up on the changes and open your mind to completely new ways of doing things. Because it's not just, it's not just generative AI that is completely making these, I hate the phrase paradigm shift, but that is just simply completely turning on its head, all of the ingrained ways that we would think about websites, assets and infrastructure over the last 15 plus years.
[00:33:50] Hope that's been interesting to you guys. And yeah, like I said, I'll make you a blog post of all this and if you got questions or things that you want to dive into in more detail or if you want to just come on on the podcast as well and just talk to me about it, then, then let's do so. But if there's one thing that I want to end with, it's this. So the thing about Adobe summit that I always loved is that you get all these presentations straight from it, straight from the horse's mouth. And when you go and you look at customer gear and you're looking at ways that you're looking at something for the first time and they did something really weird and you're like, kiddo, why'd you do that? And they're like, well you know, Adobe told me to do that. You're like, ok, Adobe told you to. Adobe. Adobe is a brand. They're a corporate entity and they have a logo.
[00:34:45] Logos don't talk, brands don't talk. You know, people talk. So somebody at Adobe told you to do this. Right?
[00:34:56] Now in this new world where there's so many new features and ways of going about things, obviously you have all these super intelligent engineers spread all through Adobe who have been doing these things for a long time. And you watch a presentation and in some cases you get the official line of basically something that integrates well with the brand story of what Adobe is doing. And then you go talk to them directly and they say, well, okay, good, it says you could do this, but you talk to that guy and then you talk to somebody else, they say, well, you know, I understand why he would say that, but there's some other cases you should consider. So when you talk to these individuals, and this is, gosh, the whole value of being able to be here in person and have the type of conversations that you want to have is that you talk to everybody and then you can now form your own view of how do you want to move forward. How does this now apply to your problems and your infrastructure? Because they could say that they're a fanboy of this new, new way of doing stuff and you go, good, I understand that you're a fan. It's certainly not gonna work for me, not at all, not even a little bit.
[00:36:12] But in some cases it totally would. And so learning about this has never been more essential. I super encourage you to go through some of the new AM live documentation.
[00:36:26] And please just reach out and talk to your friends at Adobe. Talk to me if you want about your plans going forward, because there are some things that you, if you made a strategy a year ago, you're going to want to look at it again.
[00:36:48] All right, that's all for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it. Hope you got a good walk in while you're listening to it, but see you next time.
