Cloud Manager

What Cloud Manager is

Cloud Manager is the control plane for AEM as a Cloud Service. It is the only supported route for code to reach an environment, and it also handles environment provisioning, logs, environment variables, SSL certificates and CDN configuration.

You do not deploy to AEM. You commit to Git and run a pipeline. Internalising that is most of understanding Cloud Service operations.

Programs and environments

• A program corresponds to a solution — typically one per brand or major property. It holds environments, pipelines and its own Git repository.
• Production programs carry production, stage and development environments, and are what you deploy real sites from.
• Sandbox programs are for learning and prototyping. They auto-hibernate when idle, have no production environment, and may be deleted. Do not build anything you care about in one.

Environment types within a production program:

• Production — the live site. Always paired with stage.
• Stage — mirrors production and is where the production pipeline runs its tests before promoting. You cannot deploy to production without passing through stage.
• Development — for integration work. Deployed by non-production pipelines.
• Rapid Development Environment (RDE) — a special development environment supporting near-instant deployment from the command line, for tightening the feedback loop.

Git

Every program gets an Adobe-hosted Git repository. There are two ways to work with it:

• Adobe Git only — you develop directly against the Adobe repository.
• Bring your own GitHub — you keep GitHub (or another provider) as your source of truth and link it to Cloud Manager. Adobe validates the connection, and pipelines can build from your repository. This is what most teams want: it keeps pull requests, reviews and existing CI where the team already works.

Historically the pattern was to mirror your repository into Adobe Git before deploying. The bring-your-own-GitHub integration removes most of that friction.

Roles

Cloud Manager permissions are product profiles in the Admin Console, and they matter more than they first appear:

• Business Owner — approves production deployments and can override important quality-gate failures.
• Program Manager — manages the program, pipelines and environments.
• Deployment Manager — configures and runs pipelines. The developer-adjacent role.
• Developer — commits code and views build results, but does not run production pipelines.

The separation is deliberate: the person who writes the code is not automatically the person who decides it goes live, and quality-gate overrides are attributable to a named individual.

What else lives here

• Environment variables and secrets — set per environment, referenced from OSGi configuration (day 30).
• Log download — AEM, Dispatcher and CDN logs, per environment.
• SSL certificates and custom domains — day 39.
• Content Copy — copy content from production down to stage or development, so lower environments have realistic data.
• Content Restore — point-in-time restore of content.