Adobe's recent release of AEM as a Cloud Service has inspired a ton of questions as we start to explore the platform. One of the first questions I have is: how different is this than AEM 6.5? Not a Simple Answer Before we can answer that question, you need to consider how AEM as a Cloud Service differs from the classic AEM deployment model. In AEM as a Cloud Service, the instances are continually updated by Adobe and managed in transient containers in the cloud. This drastically differs from the classic model where either the customer or Adobe Managed Services would deploy a known released version of AEM to a virtual machine running in the cloud. For developers and maintainers, this allowed us to easily set up local instances by just downloading the same AEM Jar, packages and content, at least until the next Service Pack!