Pillar 1: Content Publishing
Adobe offers tremendous flexibility. While there is a straightforward roadmap, you aren't locked into this pathway. You can use Document-based Publishing or Adobe Experience Manager.
What is Adobe Edge Delivery Services?
Learn how Edge Delivery Services will affect you as an eCommerce merchant or developer.
What Is Edge Delivery Services?
Edge Delivery Services (EDS) is a modern system for publishing website content. Content is loaded from Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) or Office 365/Google Docs (a fairly new idea). This content is rendered using a lightning-fast open-source experience built by Adobe.
A visualization
The architecture
Edge Delivery Services leverages a "headless" architecture. The website that renders content is separate from Adobe's background processes to format the content. This air gap allows for superior caching and easier development to make a lightning-fast product, both time to market and for page speed.
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Document-based Publishing
Content can come from several sources, but the new Document-based Publishing system is the most interesting. This was previously developed under the Project Franklin or Helix code names.
Content is authored in Google Docs or Office 365 using familiar methodologies—who hasn't used one of these tools? Authors write content in a word editor and preview/publish directly from this environment.
How does this work?
Adobe has built a Chrome extension (Sidekick) that is the glue between Google Docs/Office 365 and Adobe's servers. This extension lets authors preview content and interact with a Commerce store to load blocks. Developers can extend these capabilities. The result is a powerful and flexible system to deploy content.
The Foundation of Blocks
No matter the route you choose, as detailed below, blocks are the foundational aspect of Edge Delivery Services. The boilerplate EDS project includes a great starting point from which your developers can stylize to align with your brand guidelines.
Here are a few that are available out of the box:
Pros
- Less change management for switching content management systems. Document-based authoring is intuitive.
- Less security and administrative overhead. Users are already in Office 365 or Google Docs.
- It may already be included in your Adobe Commerce subscription fees.
Cons
- Ongoing change management is more complicated. Once a block is in a document, new configurations are not "auto-added".
- No approval processes. Every document editor is considered an admin. If you need more control over what is published on your website, consider Adobe Experience Manager.
Adobe Experience Manager
If you need more robust content governance, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) remains an excellent option. Thousands of large companies rely on AEM for its powerful workflows, approval points, and extensions.
You also have the option of using the Universal Editor. This provides a trimmed-down version of AEM that is more cost-effective than full-scale AEM. This is the equivalent of a WYSIWYG editor.
Pros
- Powerful capabilities for access control and publishing permissions.
- Developer-friendly extensibility to handle almost any requirement.
Cons
- Visual Editor is more costly, with AEM being "not cheap".
- More expensive to configure and maintain.
Pillar 2: Content Rendering
Adobe's Edge Delivery Services is a more unified solution, unlike most composable content management systems (Prismic, Contentful, Sanity). Developers run a few commands, and the environment is ready to go. Adobe's goal is a fast time to market, and a quality developer experience is the way to get here.
Blocks are the foundation of an Edge Delivery Services application. These are crafted with simple but modern code structures (HTML, CSS, and Javascript). Adobe has kept the learning curve to a bare minimum. Gone are the days of complicated systems that command costly hourly rates. Once your website is configured and published, a junior developer (or even AI) can build or customize blocks.
Pros
- Incredibly low learning curve.
- Lightning-fast Lighthouse scores—and a system to maintain this.
- Fast project scaffolding thanks to pre-built block collection.
Cons
- Still an up-and-coming technology. There's no massive library of websites on EDS.
- The simplicity can be a problem. There are some rough code patches ("spaghetti").
- The project is "boilerplate," which means updates may be slightly tricky.
The try before you fully buy pathway: SwiftOtter's Combiner
Committing to a new solution is risky: no one wants bleeding-edge technology. While we at SwiftOtter don't put Edge Delivery in this category, it's nowhere as battle-tested as other solutions like Contentful, Sanity, or Prismic (what powers this website).
The SwiftOtter Combiner is a tool to proxy in EDS pages into your existing store, allowing you to move one page(s) at a time to EDS. Gone are the days of porting your entire website in one set. This reduces the initial cost to a bare minimum. You get the opportunity to test Edge Delivery Services and train your team. As your budget allows, you can move additional pages. Once all pages are ported to Edge Delivery Services, we will switch off SwiftOtter's Combiner, and you'll notice a further speed improvement.
The biggest downside of SwiftOtter's Combiner is that it's a proxy. EDS-powered pages through the Combiner will not be as fast as directly using EDS.
What's the difference between Adobe Edge Delivery Services and Adobe Storefront?
Adobe Edge Delivery Services: a content publishing and rendering system that ties into Adobe Experience Manager.
Adobe Storefront: drop-in components (that can theoretically be used anywhere) to provide commerce capabilities. More information is available here.
Relevant Links
- Edge Delivery Services Overview (Adobe Experience League)
- Getting Started Tutorial (AEM Live)