The backend developers are used to build their services on top of AEM. While this model still works in AEMaaCS it is tied to a lengthy build and deploy process through cloud manager. We have to embrace the cloud and think outside the AEM Box a bit.

Let us take the example of sending emails within AEM. The platform allows us to define an email gateway and configure it to send out emails from within AEM. We can then for example write a form component and write a backend service for the form to send out the email from AEM. But is this architectural approach really desired in the cloud?

Adobe is doing everything to make AEM leaner and more scalable by for example moving out the asset processing into a cloud solution dedicated for asset processing. Should we not choose a similar approach?

We can embrace a cloud approach for our form delivery mechanism and write a cloud function to send the emails or use a robust solution such as formspree.io to handle our form submissions. This approach has the advantage of changing our delivery mechanism in the future (who still reads emails in 2021? We''re all communicating on Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and Slack these days, right?).

As a backend developer we will be doing less work on AEM itself. But wait, what about customizing the AEM authoring UI and adding features like the ones found in 'aem acs commons'?