StreamX to be featured on adaptTo() 2025 stage

adaptTo() is probably the most respected conference in the Adobe Experience Manager/Apache Sling world, and for good reason.

Every talk on its agenda goes through peer review by practitioners and contributors who know exactly what’s useful and what’s just marketing. It’s the place where AEM engineers come to discuss what actually works (and what definitely doesn’t) when you’re solving the real delivery and architecture problems that global platforms face.

That’s why we’re extra proud to share that StreamX will be featured on the adaptTo() 2025 stage as part of a session focused entirely on the technical challenges that come with running AEM in mainland China.

Tad Reeves, Principal Architect at Arbory Digital - and a familiar voice in the AEM community through his podcast and writing - will be presenting alongside Kamil Chociej, one of the StreamX Principal Engineers.

The session is titled “Solving Edge Delivery and AEM Performance in China: Comparing Approaches & Results”. And if you've ever tried to deliver a halfway decent site experience to users in mainland China with AEM (or really any globally-hosted platform), you’ll know exactly why they felt this one needed to reach this year's audience.

For Tad Reeves especially, trying to solve this issue is not a new territory. Workingin AEM architecture, DevOps, and delivery since 2010, he knows exactly how global sites run into the Great Firewall.

Tad has covered it plenty on the Arbory Digital Podcast. It's also no coincidence that the "China problem" became a big focus of the StreamX- Arbory Digital Early Adopter partnership once it became official in February 2025.

Kamil Chociej has over a decade of experience with Java, Sling, OSGi, and AEM. As a core team member at StreamX since 2023, he focuses on the DevOps, architecture, and stability work behind StreamX - including the options for China.

Inconsistencies and challenges global teams face when China becomes part of their audience footprint has set the stage for deeper technical comparison and solution tests they will present at adaptTo().

Delivering fast, reliable digital experiences in mainland China is still one of the hardest problems for any global AEM rollout. The scale alone is reason enough: the >1 000 000 000 internet users that sit behind the Great Firewall (GFW) are more than 20% of the world’s online audience. But too many teams still accept that their performance in China “just has to be” poor.

The reasons are well-known but easy to underestimate: the GFW filters or blocks requests from outside, ICP licensing is a maze, global CDNs and cloud regions stop at the border, and Edge Delivery Services and AEM as a Cloud Service have no official footprint inside China.

Do nothing, and performance metrics look exactly like you’d expect: pages crawl or time out, search and forms break, and you’re left guessing because your monitoring tools don’t see the real user experience.

Nothing about delivering content to China will ever be plug-and-play; its custom stacks, paperwork and architectural tradeoffs all the way down.

What Tad and Kamil are bringing to adaptTo() is a real-world look at how these tradeoffs actually play out. They will be running live experiments, putting all the architectural options to the test using a website that is available to the public and has a valid Chinese Internet Content Provider (ICP) license.

This means they’ll have real, on-the-ground results from tests run inside the mainland, not just theoretical graphs or edge-node estimates.

The tests will dig into the options AEM teams have been using already:

• replicating traditional infrastructure inside China (the classic AEM 6.5 approach)

• static site generation

• BYO-CDN setups,

as well as  some of more modern approaches, like using Digital Experience Mesh (DXM) like StreamX to handle dynamic content without leaning so heavily on your origin systems. 

If you don’t want to wait until adaptTo() to see how this last approach works, the StreamX demo featuring a China environment is already available to book. 

Ping us to see how DXM handles real-time delivery scenarios behind the Great Firewall. For AEM teams that want to understand whether this model makes sense for their setup, it’s a chance to test drive a solution that’s built to work under real-world China constraints.

See you in Berlin!