Do not use the Stage environment in your content creation process!

Every now and then (and definitely more often than I ever expected) I come across a question about best practices, how to promote content from the AEM as a Cloud Service Stage environment to Production. The AEM CS standard process does not allow that, and on further request it turns out, that the customers

• create and validate the production content on the Stage environment
• and when ready, promote that content to the Production environment and publish it.

This approach contradicts quite a bit the CQ5 and AEM good practices (since basically forever!), which say:

Production content is created only on the production environment. The Stage environment is used for code validation and performance testing.

These good practice are directly implemented in AEM CS, and for that reason it is not possible to promote content from Stage to the Production environment.

But there are other implications in AEM CS, when your content creation process takes place on the Stage environment:

• If your Stage environment is an integral part of your content creation process, then your Stage environment must not have any lesser SLA than the Production environment. It actually is another production environment. Which is not reflected in the SLAs in AEM CS.
• If you use your Stage environment as part of the content creation process, which environment do you use for the final validation and performance testing? In the design of AEM CS this is the role of the Stage environment, because it is sized identical to Production.
• in AEM CS the Production Fullstack pipeline covers both Stage and PROD environments, but in serial manner (first Stage and then PROD, often with an extended period of time for approval step in between). That means, that you can update your Stage environment, but not your Production environment, which could impact your content creation process.

For these reasons, do not expand your content creation process on 2 environments. If you have requirements which can only be satisfied with 2 dedicated and independent environments, please talk to Adobe product management early.

I am not saying that the product design is always 100% correct and that if you are wrong if you need 2 environments for content creation. But in most of the cases it was possible to fit the content creation process to the Production environment, especially with the addition of the preview publish. And if that’s still not a fit for your case, talk to Adobe early on, so we can learn about your requirements.