A high-five for aem.live

If you've been using Adobe Experience Manager for a short while, you may have wondered what the hlx.live and hlx.page in the preview and live URLs of your site mean. If you have been using AEM for a longer while, you may have wondered when *.hlx.live would follow the steps of aem up, www.aem.live, and AEM Sidekick.

Today is the day we make the switch. I'm happy to announce that hlx.live is now aem.live and this transition brings several new changes that will improve your experience:

  1. New Domains: your site is now available under *.aem.live and previews are on *.aem.page
  2. Improved Performance: Previews on *.aem.page are a bit faster than on *.hlx.page, thanks to better caching
  3. More and better stuff: aem.live enables advanced features such as centralized configurations, repoless sites, and more secure authentication

Starting today, all new projects created from the tutorial, will use the new aem.live architecture. Existing projects can upgrade following these steps.

AEM Live has been in development for nearly a year and in production for over six months. With more than 25% of our traffic now handled by aem.live, it’s proven itself ready for your site’s upgrade and your site will be in good company.

Profile photo for Joe Doherty

Speaking of good company, Joe Doherty, director of web development at The Channel Company shared this anecdote with us: "We've been running on aem.live since we heard about it on the AEM Discord channel a few months ago. When the business asked us to spin up an entirely new regional site with an unheard-of deadline of just four weeks, other teams would have balked at the challenge. With aem.live and repoless sites, we were able to meet that demand and help our business grow."

Edge Delivery Services for Adobe Experience Manager Sites as a Cloud Service started more than five years ago with Project Helix, and the acronym hlx could be found by our early adopters all over the place: in domains, user names, command line tools, and so on. With aem.live as the default, the name Helix is back to being an internal designator of the architecture version and the hlx.live and hlx.page domain names will see an eventual end of service.

Ready to make the switch? Upgrade your existing projects to aem.live today and start enjoying faster performance, advanced features, and a seamless AEM experience. For detailed instructions on how to upgrade, visit our upgrade guide or reach out to our team for assistance.