Cloud Service and On-Premise Deployment, Environments, and DevOps
A candidate must understand the AEM as a Cloud Service model: the separation of code and content, the Cloud Manager pipeline, and the immutable, containerized publish and author tiers. Know the environment types (development, stage, production, and rapid development environments), the role of the repository and the content transfer tool, and how configuration as code (OSGi configs, run modes, Cloud Manager config pipelines) replaces manual console changes. Understand the difference between the full-stack pipeline and the config pipeline, and why mutable content packages are restricted.
Key concepts include run modes, environment variables and secrets, the Cloud Manager quality gates, and the deployment lifecycle from commit to production. Understand how on-premise and managed services differ: local SDK versus cloud, manual versus pipeline deployment, and the constraints on custom code (no custom agents, restricted replication). Also know the role of the local SDK for development and the content transfer tool for migrations.
Traps include assuming console access to OSGi on cloud (it is restricted), or deploying content packages through the code pipeline when they belong in a content package or config pipeline. Another trap confuses stage and production promotion, or assumes replication agents can be customized. Expect questions on why a config works locally but not in the cloud (run mode mismatch, missing environment variable) and on the immutability of the publish tier.
Rule of thumb: everything that can be code or configuration should be in Git and deployed through Cloud Manager; manual changes do not survive. Worked example: an OSGi config that differs per environment should use environment-specific run modes or Cloud Manager environment variables, not a manual console edit.