Top 25 Interview Questions and Answers for DevOps for AEM

1. What is DevOps for AEM?

DevOps for AEM refers to implementing DevOps principles—automation, CI/CD, monitoring, and collaboration—to streamline the development, testing, deployment, and operation of Adobe Experience Manager applications. It ensures faster releases, stable environments, reduced errors, and seamless content delivery across AEM Publish, Author, and Dispatcher layers.

2. Why is DevOps important in AEM projects?

Because AEM involves multiple layers (Author, Publish, Dispatcher), manual deployment is slow and error-prone. DevOps adds automation, improves code quality, accelerates releases, enables swift rollback, and ensures high performance and availability.

3. What are the key components of AEM architecture relevant to DevOps?

• AEM Author
• AEM Publish instances
• Dispatcher
• Oak repository
• Load balancers
• CDN
• AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) components like pipelines and Cloud Manager

4. How does CI/CD work for AEM?

A typical CI/CD pipeline includes:

• Code commit in Git
• Build using Maven
• Static code analysis using SonarQube
• Unit tests & OSGi bundle validation
• Deployment to AEM environments
• Automated functional/UI tests
• Approval & production deployment

5. What is Cloud Manager in AEMaaCS?

Cloud Manager is Adobe’s CI/CD tool for AEM as a Cloud Service. It allows automatic builds, security checks, performance tests, and controlled deployment across dev, stage, and production environments.

6. What is the role of Maven in AEM DevOps?

Maven is used for building OSGi bundles, packaging content in .zip or .jar files, managing dependencies, and deploying packages to AEM via content-package-maven-plugin.

7. What is the Dispatcher and how does it affect DevOps?

Dispatcher acts as a caching and load-balancing layer. DevOps ensures automated:

• Cache invalidation
• Deployment of dispatcher configs
• Handling cache-flush rules
• Ensuring correctness of rewrite rules

8. How do you automate AEM deployments?

Common methods:

• Jenkins pipelines
• Adobe Cloud Manager
• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions
• Ansible for configuration automation
• Packages deployed via Maven or cURL scripts

9. What is the difference between AEM On-Prem, AMS, and AEMaaCS in DevOps?

• On-Prem: Full control; manual servers; heavy DevOps setup.
• AMS: Adobe Managed Services; Adobe manages infra; Cloud Manager available.
• AEMaaCS: Fully cloud-native, automated scaling, immutable deployments, Git-based pipelines.

10. What are Content Packages in AEM?

Content packages (.zip) store code, components, templates, clientlibs, and configuration. DevOps automates building, validating, and deploying these packages.

11. How do you ensure code quality in AEM DevOps?

• SonarQube checks
• Code coverage tests
• OSGi bundle audits
• AEM best-practice checks
• Front-end linting (ESLint, Stylelint)

12. What is OSGi in AEM? Why is it important in DevOps?

OSGi is a modular Java framework used by AEM. DevOps pipelines ensure that OSGi bundles are built correctly, dependencies are resolved, and services are registered properly to avoid runtime issues.

13. What are commonly used DevOps tools in AEM projects?

• Jenkins
• GitHub Actions
• Azure DevOps
• SonarQube
• Docker
• Kubernetes (for microservices)
• Adobe Cloud Manager
• Ansible
• Nagios, New Relic, Datadog for monitoring

14. How does version control work in AEM DevOps?

Git is used to manage AEM project structure, maintain branches (develop, feature, release), and trigger automated builds upon commits and pull requests.

15. What are the challenges in AEM DevOps?

• Large package size
• Dispatcher configs across environments
• Long build times
• Handling content sync
• Managing environment parity
• Testing front-end assets (clientlibs)

16. What is Sling in AEM?

Sling is a REST-based framework that maps HTTP requests to content resources. DevOps ensures Sling models, servlets, and resource mappings work as expected after deployments.

17. How do you handle AEM Dispatcher invalidation?

• Automated cache flush scripts
• AEM flush agents
• Sling Content Distribution
• CDN invalidation
• Controlled cache-expiry policies

18. How do you monitor AEM performance?

• JMX monitoring
• Logs via Splunk, Datadog, ELK
• Thread dumps and heap usage
• AEM performance dashboards
• CDN/dispatcher hit ratio metrics

19. What testing types are used in AEM DevOps?

• Unit tests (JUnit)
• UI tests (Selenium, Cypress)
• Regression tests
• Performance tests
• Security scans
• AEM Cloud Manager automated tests

20. What is AEM Project Archetype?

A template by Adobe used to generate structured AEM projects. DevOps pipelines rely on this standardization for smooth builds and deployments.

21. How do you handle configuration management in AEM?

Using:

• OSGi configs in /apps/project/config
• Environment-specific configs using runmodes
• Ansible, Chef, or Cloud Manager for automating config deployment

22. What is the role of runmodes in AEM?

Runmodes help load environment-specific configurations such as dev, stage, prod. DevOps uses this to automate controlled deployments based on the target environment.

23. How do you automate Dispatcher configuration deployment?

• Use Git for storing dispatcher configs
• Automated pipelines to validate syntax
• Deployment via Cloud Manager or Jenkins
• Automated reload & cache flush

24. How do you handle rollback in AEM deployments?

• Versioned packages
• Tags in Git
• Backup of /crx-quickstart (for On-Prem)
• Cloud Manager supports automatic rollback
• Storing previous dispatcher configs

25. What skills are required for a DevOps for AEM Engineer?

• Strong understanding of AEM architecture
• CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Cloud Manager)
• Git proficiency
• Knowledge of Web servers (Apache)
• Understanding of Dispatcher rules
• Cloud knowledge (AWS/Azure/Adobe Cloud)
• Monitoring & logging tools
• Automation tools like Ansible or Docker

Conclusion

DevOps for AEM is a highly specialized field combining development, content management, automation, and deployment. By mastering the questions above, you’ll be well prepared for technical interviews and real-world AEM DevOps challenges.