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Tag: Adobe Experience Cloud

  • Adobe Adds Tools for Building Custom Applications

    Adobe Adds Tools for Building Custom Applications

    Adobe this week launched a series of tools intended to make it easier to build custom applications that can be deployed on a serverless computing platform on the Adobe Experience Cloud.

    Announced at the online Adobe Developers Live event, the Project Firefly framework promises to make it easier for developers to build cloud-native applications that leverage the open source Apache OpenWhisk serverless computing framework.

    The Firefly framework will make it easier for developers to, for example, invoke Adobe Analytics capabilities from within a custom application using functions, said Jason Woosley, vice president of developer experience and commerce for Adobe.

    Adobe this week also launched React Spectrum, an open source collection of libraries and tools for building interactive applications using the React framework. Based on JavaScript, React Spectrum makes it easier to build front-end interactive applications in a way that scales consistently.

    Finally, Adobe added Adobe Experience Platform Launch Server Side, which makes it easier to collect data via Adobe Web and Mobile software development kits (SDKs).

    Woosley said interest in building custom applications on Adobe Experience Platform has accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations of all sizes moving timetables for digital business transformation initiatives forward to engage customers online. Those initiatives frequently begin with marketing applications that are extensions of the software that Adobe makes available via its cloud platform, he said.

    Once those applications are built they also typically need to be integrated with any number of back-end systems that act as systems of record for the business. Those tasks have become easier for developers to accomplish using any number of application programming interfaces (APIs) that providers of those platforms expose.

    Most of the digital business applications are being built by professional developers employing best DevOps practices, Woosey said. As the Adobe strategy for enabling developers to build applications evolves, Adobe it evaluating to what degree it needs to embed DevOps capabilities within its cloud platform, he noted.

    The Adobe Experience Cloud platform provides organizations with access to a series of applications that they can extend using Firefly, which eliminates the need to build every custom application from the ground up. As digital business transformation projects become a higher priority, the rate at which organizations need to build and deploy these applications has increased to the point where many of those organizations require a systematic approach based on best DevOps practices to build, deploy and update applications at scale.

    It’s not clear to what degree the rise of digital business transformation initiatives will eventually act as a forcing function for adopting DevOps more widely within organizations. However, given the strategic importance of many of these projects, it appears all but inevitable that most organizations will need to modernize the way applications are built and deployed if they hope to remain relevant. In fact, embracing best DevOps practices is nothing less now than a matter of survival for many of those organizations.

  • Adobe Strategy Revolves Around DevOps

    Adobe Strategy Revolves Around DevOps

    At the Adobe Summit 2019 conference this week, Adobe detailed that its Adobe Experience Cloud customer experience ecosystem is reliant on a set of best DevOps processes that is wrapped around a modern microservices architecture and layered on top of big data platform deployed on the Azure cloud.

    Adobe last year acquired Magento, provider of an e-commerce platform, and Marketo, provider of a marketing automation platform. Since then, Adobe has been working to integrate those offerings with its existing marketing application to create the Adobe Experience Cloud.

    Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of platform engineering for Adobe, said this set of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are being integrated around a shared common data model that is layered on a microservices-based architecture of containers running on Kubernetes clusters. On top of that, Adobe is layering a series of machine learning algorithms, dubbed Sensei, to embed artificial intelligence (AI) across the entire portfolio, he said.

    As that work progresses, Adobe plans to allow customers and partners to leverage the data stored in the Adobe Experience Cloud to train their own AI models using data curated by Adobe, Bhambhri noted. That data model, known as the Experience Data Model (XDM), is also being shared with partners including Microsoft and SAP, which last year committed to an ambitious initiative to build a common data model in collaboration with Adobe. XDM makes use of open source Kafka messaging software to integrate the various data pipelines that are required to integrate these applications at scale in near real-time, Bhambhri said.

    Those efforts complement an existing initiative under which Adobe is exposing open application programming interfaces (APIs) to encourage developers to build applications that extend Adobe Experience Cloud.

    Rather than building their own customer data platforms, organizations can drive their digital business initiatives using a big data platform managed by Adobe on their behalf. Many organizations have been building their own platforms to achieve that goal with mixed success, first deploying a data warehouse on top of a big data platform and then working to integrate various applications to provide a richer digital customer experience. Bhambri noted Adobe is pouring considerable resources to obviate the need for organizations to acquire, deploy and manage their own IT infrastructure to achieve that goal.

    IT leaders must decide whether they want to reduce the time, money and effort required to build these custom platforms in favor of using a managed service from Adobe—which, arguably, would enable them to pour more resources into developing applications that, as a result, would come to market faster.

    In the meantime, it’s clear the need to embrace digital business transformation will drive more organizations to embrace DevOps processes. The question now is to what degree they need to define their own set of best DevOps processes versus simply lifting the DevOps best practices that organizations such as Adobe have already proven.

    — Mike Vizard