Adobe Experience Manager Services: Migration, Cloud Manager DevOps and Managed AEM Support

Adobe Experience Manager is no longer a platform you administer. On AEM as a Cloud Service there is no SSH, no root, no shell, and no way to hot-fix a running instance. Adobe ships updates you did not schedule, /apps and /libs are immutable at runtime, and the only path to production is a Cloud Manager pipeline that will refuse your release if a quality gate fails.

That change turned AEM operations into platform engineering. Techtweek Infotech provides Adobe Experience Manager services built around that reality: migration off AEM 6.5, Cloud Manager pipeline and quality-gate engineering, Edge Delivery Services performance work, and ongoing managed operations — delivered by engineers who work on the pipeline rather than on the server.

The deadline that is driving most AEM work right now

Adobe has published the end of the road for AEM 6.5:

Deployment	Support ends	Source
AEM 6.5 on Adobe Managed Services	31 August 2026	Adobe releases roadmap
AEM 6.5 on-premises, core support	February 2027 (Service Pack 6.5.26.0, the last supported service pack, is supported until 28 February 2027)	Adobe releases roadmap
AEM 6.5 LTS	Ongoing branch — Adobe's documented support runs to 28 February 2027, with LTS carrying forward new updates, Java 17 and Java 21	AEM 6.5 LTS FAQ

An enterprise AEM migration realistically takes six to twelve months. If you are on 6.5 and have not started, the arithmetic has already stopped working in your favour. That is the honest position, and it is why most of our current AEM work is migration and stabilisation rather than greenfield build.

Read the full comparison on our AEM 6.5 end-of-life page.

What we do

AEM 6.5 to Cloud Service migration

Fixed scope, run in rehearsal cycles rather than as one cutover.

• Readiness assessment. Repository structure, custom code inventory, OSGi bundles, third-party integrations, index definitions, content volume, and the Best Practices Analyzer / AEM Analyzer output. This is where we find the work that actually stalls migrations.
• Repository restructuring. Splitting legacy content packages into ui.apps, ui.content and ui.config, and eliminating the mutable/immutable violations that a cloud build rejects outright.
• Content transfer. Content Transfer Tool extraction and ingestion, sized properly — the tool needs data store size + node store size × 1.5 in free disk, so a 20 GB segment store needs roughly 94 GB free before you start. Migration sets are capped at ten per project and the extraction key expires after 14 days.
• Index and search. Custom indexes configured before ingestion, not after, because CTT does not create them for you.
• Rehearsal and cutover. Author ingestion scales the entire Author deployment down and no Cloud Manager pipeline can run while it happens. That outage window is planned and rehearsed, not discovered on the night.

Detail on all of this is on the AEM as a Cloud Service migration page.

Cloud Manager CI/CD and quality-gate engineering

Cloud Manager is the only route to production, and its gates are not advisory. A Security Rating below B fails the pipeline immediately. Reliability below C, Maintainability below A, or unit-test coverage under 50% pause it and force someone to override.

Teams migrating from Jenkins usually discover this the first time a release stops. We build and remediate the pipelines: production, non-production, config and front-end; build-time reduction so releases are not gated on a slow Maven build; SonarQube, OakPAL and Dispatcher validation failures cleared properly rather than overridden; and deployment sequencing that a content team can actually plan around.

Detail on the pipeline types and every gate threshold is on the Cloud Manager CI/CD page.

Edge Delivery Services

EDS replaces the Publish and Dispatcher tier with an Adobe-managed CDN, deploys from GitHub, and runs on plain HTML, modern CSS and vanilla JavaScript — no bundler, no transpilation. It is the only part of the AEM stack where a 100 Lighthouse score is the design target rather than an aspiration.

We implement EDS blocks, wire document-based authoring or the Universal Editor, and treat Core Web Vitals as an SLA. We will also tell you when EDS is the wrong answer for your site, which is more often than the marketing suggests. See the Edge Delivery Services page.

Managed AEM operations

Ongoing ownership of the platform after go-live: release management through Cloud Manager, quality-gate monitoring, Dispatcher and CDN configuration and cache-invalidation strategy, index maintenance, asset processing and Dynamic Media configuration, and observability — shipping logs and metrics out of a platform you cannot log into, into a stack you can actually query. Combined with our NOC monitoring services where 24/7 coverage is required.

Four ways to engage

Managed retainer. We own AEM platform operations month to month. Suits organisations that have an AEM site and no AEM platform engineer, which is the most common situation we see after a migration completes and the system integrator leaves.

Fixed-scope project. A migration, a Cloud Manager remediation, an EDS build, a performance engagement. Defined deliverables, defined price. Most clients start with a two-to-four-week readiness assessment, which is small enough to approve without a committee and produces a document that makes the larger decision obvious either way.

Dedicated engineer. An AEM platform engineer working inside your team, on your backlog, under your direction, full or part time. Useful when you have the roadmap and the process and are simply short a person who knows Cloud Manager.

White-label delivery for Adobe agencies. We deliver AEM DevOps and platform work behind your brand. Agencies win AEM projects on strategy, design and content, then need platform engineers on the bench for the migration and pipeline work. We staff that part, under your account management, without appearing in front of your client.

Who you are actually hiring

A team of three to five AEM platform engineers, across AEMaaCS operations, Cloud Manager pipeline work and Edge Delivery Services front-end engineering. Those are three different skill profiles and we staff them as such.

We are not an Adobe Solution Partner and we do not resell Adobe licences. We are the engineering team that runs the platform after someone else has sold it, which is why a large share of our AEM work arrives through other agencies rather than through Adobe.

That white-label route also means most of what we have delivered sits behind another firm's brand and under their client NDAs. Without naming them: AEM platform work for a global games and entertainment platform, and for a global pharmaceutical group, both delivered through partner agencies under their account management. We can walk through the technical shape of either engagement on a call. We cannot put the names on a web page, and any supplier who would put yours here without asking will do the same to you.

What to ask any AEM partner before you sign

• Who exactly will do the work, and are they employees or a bench you have never met?
• Have they run a Cloud Manager pipeline through a failed quality gate, and what did they do about it?
• Can they name the Content Transfer Tool's limits without looking them up?
• Will they tell you when the honest answer is to stay on 6.5 LTS?
• What happens after go-live, and who owns the platform then?

What actually goes wrong on AEM projects

Worth stating plainly, because the sales version of this is usually silent about it.

• Custom OSGi bundles and third-party integrations stall migrations, not content. Content transfer is a solved, tool-driven problem. A ten-year-old integration with a system nobody owns any more is not.
• Runtime writes that worked on 6.5 fail on Cloud Service. Any code that wrote to /apps at runtime has to be redesigned, not ported.
• Quality-gate debt is invisible until the first cloud release. SonarQube findings that were advisory for years become the thing standing between you and a deploy.
• You cannot debug by logging in. Everything becomes log-driven and pipeline-driven, which is a different engineering discipline and a real cause of post-migration slowdown.
• Forced updates. Adobe ships continuously. Custom code has to survive updates on Adobe's schedule, which changes how much custom code is worth writing.

Where to start

If you are on AEM 6.5, start with a readiness assessment — it is bounded, it is priceable, and it gives you a defensible answer on LTS versus Cloud Service rather than a vendor's opinion.

If you are already on Cloud Service and your releases are slow, unreliable, or blocked at a gate, start with a Cloud Manager pipeline review.

If you are an agency with a project won and no bench, tell us the scope and the timeline.

Ask us for pricing. There is no rate card on this page on purpose. AEM engagements vary by an order of magnitude depending on custom code volume, integration count and content scale, and a published day rate would tell you nothing useful about any of them. Tell us what you are running and what you need, and you get a scoped number rather than a range.

Request a quote or see our related DevOps consulting services, cloud infrastructure services, dedicated engineers and staff augmentation.

Common questions

Do you work on AEM 6.5, or only Cloud Service?

Both. A large share of current work is 6.5 stabilisation and LTS upgrades for organisations that have decided not to move to Cloud Service before the deadline, alongside the migrations themselves.

Can you take over an AEM instance another partner built?

Yes, and it is a common starting point. The first engagement is an audit: repository structure, custom code, pipeline configuration, gate status, index health and integration inventory. You get a written assessment of what you have inherited before anyone commits to a support model.

What does AEM cost to run?

Adobe does not publish list pricing, and the implementation and partner fees usually exceed the licence. We have set out the public figures, their sources and the cost drivers on our Adobe Experience Manager cost page.

How quickly can an engineer start?

That depends on current bench availability and the skill mix required — AEMaaCS platform work, Cloud Manager, and EDS front-end engineering are three different profiles. Tell us the scope and we will tell you honestly what we can staff and when, rather than promising a start date and back-filling it.

Can you work with our existing system integrator?

Yes. Splitting platform and DevOps responsibility from application delivery is a workable model and often a cheaper one, provided the boundary is written down. We will define it as part of scoping.