AEM MIGRATION UNDERWAY?

Make your AEMaaCS
actually
work in China

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.

PoC your way out
China highlighted on the Wolds map to illustrate where your website can have problems displaying

THE PROBLEM

AEM's Cloud Service stops at the China border

.

AEMaaCS works globally but gets blocked in China


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.

Reason 1: Infrastructure

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.

Reason 2: Law

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.

Reason 3: Firewall

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

After migration, your every page
will have to travel through Great China Firewall

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:

Load time button

20-30 seconds page load time

WHY: Content is served from abroad (e.g Japan)

Blocked assets button

Blocked fonts and assets

WHY: Great China Firewall interfering with global DAM

Broken search button

Broken search, stale content

WHY: cross-border requests blocked by GFW

Expired MLPS button

Expired MLPS 2.0

WHY: No approved local delivery or hosting strategy

Kasia Wasiluk-Maksymiuk
Deep dive

Analysis: Why AEMaaCS migration may break your compliance in China

by Kasia Wasiluk-Maksymiuk, Technical PM

Read the analysis
Tad Reeves
Partner focus

Infrastructure options for AEM/Edge Delivery Performance in China

by Tad Reeves, Principal Architect, Arbory Digital

go to arborydigital.com

THE SOLUTION

StreamX - the last mile content delivery for China

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.

StreamX mode of operation
near-real time sync

Near real-time sync form AEMaaCS to in-China delivery

fast page loads

< 3s page loads (tested across major cities in China*)

mlps compliance

Compliance with MLPS 2.0 hosting expectations

functional features

Fully fuctional features (search, listings, sitemap)

granular control

Full granular control over how customers data is processed

real-time sync

Real-time sync form AEMaaCS to in-China delivery

How StreamX works

SOLUTION

StreamX extends AEMaaCS for China

.

KEEP

AEMaaCS as your global Content Management System

GET

In-China content delivery, synched with origin on every change


KEEP

CMS that gets every upgrade

GET

A way to push AEMaaCS content to China


KEEP

Adobe Content Management workflow and tools

GET

Delivery layer that works for China


KEEP

Your global search of choice

GET

Real-time search that works for China


KEEP

Power to decide what kind of information reaches the Chinese market

GET

Lightweight granular delivery instead of duplicating the monolith

SOLUTION

Works for more than just AEMaaCS

.

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.

CONNECTOR/ACCELERATOR

Adobe commerce

CONNECTOR

aem edge delivery services (EDS)

CONNECTOR

Adobe Universal Editor
Smart data ingestion

Smart data ingestion

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.

StreamX documentation

A VALID QUESTION

<3 second page load times without
duplicate backend inside China

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.

Fast page load

Pages loading in under 3 seconds across all major cities

Consistent TTI

Consistent time-to-interactive even under heavy load

Presynced data

Pre-synced data for real-time search

No runtime dependency

No runtime dependency on global backends

How StreamX gets your site "fast by design"

GLAD YOU ASKED!

Why not just use AMS and BYOCDN?

Adobe’s official stance is that Adobe Managed Services can be used to host in China if needed. But migrating part of your stack to AMS just for one market:

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.

Michał Cukierman

"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."


Deep dive

Hosting in and out of China: the site availability tests

by Michał Cukierman, StreamX co-founder and CTO

Read the article

STREAMX POC PROGRAM

Try it without the risk

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

Marta Cukierman
Co-founder, CEO

Connect on LinkedIn ↗

Join the PoC Program

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FURTHER READING

AEM and EDS vs. China