AEM MIGRATION UNDERWAY?
Paperwork, local hosting, ICP, MLPS 2.0. You’ve put real money and effort into getting your China site right. But now Adobe’s roadmap says it’s time to move to AEM as a Cloud Service.
The problem? AEMaaCS won't work with a local delivery layer. And that’s where your China presence lives or dies.
THE PROBLEM
With AEM on-prem, you've hosted and controlled the CMS and delivery layer yourself. But with AEMaaCS, it's all a bundle. Your CMS and delivery are now one Cloud Service hosted in Adobe's global cloud. There is an option to bring your own CDN, but you can't run Author, Publish or Dispatcher locally anymore.
That's perfectly fine for most markets. But China is not your ordinary market - both in legal and technical terms.
AEMaaCS runs on standard AWS/Azure regions with shared CDNs. But China’s cloud regions are isolated by law and must be operated by a local partner.
To stay legal, your site needs to be hosted inside mainland China with mid/high tier MLPS compliance and an ICP license. Serving content from offshore will invalidate that license.
Even if your CDN or origin is just outside China in the APAC region, the Great China Firewall will inspect, throttle and/or block all cross-border traffic.
THE REALITY
Many teams delay the migration just to keep China running. Others try to rebuild the site using different CMS + local delivery layer, or deliver static copies of their global site via cloud instance in China. Adobe offers to add a managed on-prem to serve content locally if you bring your own Chinese CDN. Neither option is ideal, but without any plan for China, here's what you'll see happen:
WHY: Content is served from abroad (e.g Japan)
WHY: Great China Firewall interfering with global DAM
WHY: cross-border requests blocked by GFW
WHY: No approved local delivery or hosting strategy
by Kasia Wasiluk-Maksymiuk, Technical PM
by Tad Reeves, Principal Architect, Arbory Digital
THE SOLUTION
StreamX gets your published AEMaaCS pages, assets, and real-time data into a lightweight cluster inside China, and serves it through a fast, local and MLPS-compliant delivery layer.
Near real-time sync form AEMaaCS to in-China delivery
< 3s page loads (tested across major cities in China*)
Compliance with MLPS 2.0 hosting expectations
Fully fuctional features (search, listings, sitemap)
Full granular control over how customers data is processed
Real-time sync form AEMaaCS to in-China delivery
SOLUTION
AEMaaCS as your global Content Management System
In-China content delivery, synched with origin on every change
CMS that gets every upgrade
A way to push AEMaaCS content to China
Adobe Content Management workflow and tools
Delivery layer that works for China
Your global search of choice
Real-time search that works for China
Power to decide what kind of information reaches the Chinese market
Lightweight granular delivery instead of duplicating the monolith
SOLUTION
StreamX isn’t just a delivery patch for AEMaaCS. It’s a digital experience mesh that any part of your stack can push its data into.
StreamX has an universal data entry point through its REST Ingestion Service.
This means nearly any e-commerce platform, PIM, search service, or recommendations engine can push real-time data:
page updates
price changes
fresh product details
meant for your website straight into the Digital Experience Mesh. StreamX processes it in real time and enables fast, legal delivery inside China.
A VALID QUESTION
With StreamX you get to keep consistent global backend and access to latest AEMaaCS upgrades, but deliver with the stability, compliance and speed that would only be possible if you hosted a copy of your entire stack in China.
Pages loading in under 3 seconds across all major cities
Consistent time-to-interactive even under heavy load
Pre-synced data for real-time search
No runtime dependency on global backends
GLAD YOU ASKED!
Splits evironments, which means added operational complexity
Requires additional licensing and infrastructure overhead
Bring Your Own CDN is a valid option, but only solves one piece of the puzzle: static content delivery.
You still need a dynamic/fast changing content handling, and a way to ensure everything downstream of your CMS operates behind the firewall.
"If you’re moving to AEMaaCS or Edge Delivery Services with document-based authoring, you can’t spin up your own publishers in China anymore - everything is a managed service. Adobe’s documentation suggests that an in-China CDN will solve the problem, but that only covers static assets - and even then, it won’t help for content that can’t be cached."
by Michał Cukierman, StreamX co-founder and CTO
STREAMX POC PROGRAM
If you are planning - or are midway through - your AEMaaCS migration, we offer a Proof of Concept designed exactly for the China use case.
Technically aligned with China’s MLPS 2.0 security framework
Ready for stacks that include AEM/AEMaaCS, Adobe Commerce, PIM and Edge Delivery
Value measured on your metrics (load time, data sync, uptime, you name it) and achieved in weeks rather than months
Transition to production-ready deployment, hosted on your infrastructure inside China, with full support.
Marta Cukierman
Co-founder, CEO
FURTHER READING