Adobe runs its vast open-source application portfolio in Azure

Deliver great customer experiences

Adobe has long been synonymous with cutting-edge creative software: Adobe Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, and Creative Suite. Most of these products have found their way into a convenient, powerful, and cost-effective software as a service (SaaS) offering called Adobe Creative Cloud.

But with the advent of digital media, Adobe realized that it’s not enough for businesses to create beautiful content. They need to follow through with an understanding of how people engage with that content, on what devices, and in what context, so they can continue to refine their interactions with prospects and customers.

So, in March 2017, Adobe introduced Adobe Experience Cloud, a set of tools that complements Adobe Creative Cloud by letting businesses deliver personalized content to any audience, track it from engagement to conversion, and use the data to generate insights and shape action.

“At Adobe, we believe that experience is the great differentiator, the make-or-break attribute to ignite lifelong customer advocacy and growth,” says Brad Rencher, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Digital Marketing at Adobe. “Leveraging deep customer intelligence, Adobe Experience Cloud gives businesses everything they need to deliver a well-designed, personal, and consistent experience that delights customers at every touchpoint.”

Experience Cloud connects with Microsoft Dynamics 365 so that businesses can infuse campaign orchestration with sales and customer relationship data. And it links to Microsoft Power BI so marketers can easily analyze campaign data.

Run enormous SaaS business from Azure

As Adobe migrates more products to a SaaS model, it has signed a strategic partnership with Microsoft to make Microsoft Azure its preferred cloud platform.

“Adobe is offering consumer and enterprise applications in Azure, along with our next-gen applications like Adobe Cloud Platform,” says Brandon Pulsipher, Vice President of Technical Operations and Managed Services at Adobe. “Our partnership with Microsoft demonstrates that cloud-native applications in Azure make great sense for large and small customers alike.”

Adobe Experience Manager, part of Experience Cloud, was the company’s first solution deployed in Azure. This was quickly followed by Adobe Cloud Platform, the technology behind Adobe Creative Cloud, along with Adobe Document Cloud. Soon to move to Azure are Adobe Sign and Adobe Creative Cloud.

Adobe cloud products make extensive use of Azure platform as a service (PaaS) offerings such as Azure Data Factory, which has allowed the company to quickly and easily integrate data from multiple hybrid sources at scale to drive meaningful insights for its customers. Adobe built its data lake with Azure Data Lake Storage along with Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings like Azure Virtual Machines.

Azure “speaks” open source

Adobe products also make extensive use of open-source software. Experience Manager is built on Java and runs on the CentOS operating system. Other Adobe products run under the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system.

“We are primarily an open-source versus a Microsoft .NET shop, and we love Azure,” says Mike Mellor, Senior Director, Technical Operations at Adobe. “Because Azure offers extensive polyglot support for languages such as Go [Golang], Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and Node.js, our developers can write software in the language of their choice while still having access to the full set of Azure PaaS services. All the open-source services we want are fully supported in Azure.”

For example, the Adobe Cloud Platform uses Mesosphere DC/OS as its container solution and runs hundreds of Docker instances, hosting more than 150 microservices on both Linux and Windows Server–based Azure Virtual Machines.

“Because we wrote Experience Manager in Java and not .NET, we were initially worried about deploying in Azure,” Pulsipher says. “However, the product works well in Azure. We’re happy to say that Azure fully supports Java and CentOS.”

Mellor adds that Java-focused development teams at Adobe were originally suspicious of running open-source software in Azure but are now “super happy.”

Protect big SaaS applications with multilayer security 

Some customers are concerned about running their mission-critical Adobe applications—many of which include petabytes of confidential customer and sales data—in the cloud. But Adobe allays those concerns by providing evidence of the multilayer security of Azure.

“Azure complies with multiple international and industry security compliance standards and certifications that our customers demand,” Pulsipher says. “This allows us to offer our solutions in Azure with confidence.”

Plus, Adobe has the freedom to apply security in Azure at a granular resource level—to associate a firewall rule with a virtual network, subnet, or even a specific virtual machine.

The company is also syncing Azure user management tools with Active Directory. In addition to the directness of the solution—no third-party tools, integrations, or manual workflows—Adobe gets two big benefits. First, when employees leave Adobe, their access is immediately removed. Second, for employees who are new or change roles, the IT team can rapidly provision their access so that it matches up with established Active Directory groups and the employees can be productive from the get-go.

Then there’s Azure Security Center, which Adobe uses to quickly find and respond to potential vulnerabilities. “Azure Security Center, coupled with Microsoft security and operations management services, allows us to utilize our existing security incident, event manager, and security operation center processes to triage events in Azure,” Mellor says.

Adobe also implements limited automated response. For example, if an unapproved Azure Storage account is granted public access, the Adobe monitoring platform removes permissions until the proper approvals are in place.

Azure global security monitoring provides additional validation and support to further protect the Adobe environment and data. “We consider the Azure global security monitoring group a huge differentiator for Azure,” Mellor says. “We point it out to customers. It’s a second set of eyes, after our own security team, on our infrastructure.”

Deliver great customer experiences with outstanding availability and performance

With Azure, Adobe has the enterprise-grade availability and performance needed to deliver outstanding customer experiences with its software.

Specifically, Adobe uses Azure Availability Zones to perform disaster recovery drills and demonstrate Azure resilience to customers. Availability Zones are fault-isolated locations within an Azure datacenter. They provide redundant power, cooling, and networking to allow customers to run mission-critical applications with higher availability and fault tolerance to datacenter failures.

“Running Azure Availability Zone outage drills helps us test our solutions for resiliency in a new and unique way,” Mellor says. “We turn off components of the architecture within Azure, then validate the overall resiliency. This delivers greater confidence to customers that their Adobe software will always be available.”

Adobe also takes advantage of another Azure technical feature to promote great performance of its software. Azure exposes its server processors as real physical cores versus logical cores, which Mellor says results in substantially better performance per dollar than equivalent offerings from other cloud providers. “This ability to access physical CPU cores is a big competitive advantage for Azure,” says Mellor.

Free up resources to focus on core business

By choosing to run its SaaS applications in Azure, Adobe has freed its employees from datacenter and infrastructure worries and given them more time to devote to building innovative software. “Like most organizations, we try to do more with less so we can focus on delivering value to our customers,” says Pulsipher. “Azure helps us do that by providing so many rich, cloud-native services that shorten development time. We don’t have to write code to create them or spend time researching third-party options. They’re there in Azure for the taking.”

Mellor adds, “Using Azure frees us to focus on where we add value—developing great software and delivering great customer experiences. Customers don’t care where that software is hosted as long as it’s reliable and available and it performs well.”

Pulsipher closes by saying that the people behind Azure are every bit as critical to his company’s success with Azure as the platform’s technical features. “From our perspective, the people at Microsoft really differentiate it from competitors,” he says. “Across the Azure Customer Advisory Team, Azure support team, and Microsoft executive teams, we can always find somebody ready to jump in and help us solve challenges and be successful. The Adobe and Microsoft partnership is just getting started, and we’re really looking forward to seeing what the partnership brings next.” 

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