A developer is tasked with designing a solution to accommodate multiple client projects within a single Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) instance, each…

The question specifies a requirement for "true multi-tenancy" with zero shared code, content, or authors. This level of strict isolation cannot be achieved within a single AEM instance. A single instance inherently shares the underlying JCR repository, the OSGi container, the codebase under /apps, and the user management system under /home. While ACLs (Option C) and component properties (Option B) provide logical separation for content authors, they do not prevent shared code or a shared user base. Therefore, the only architecture that satisfies the requirement for complete independence and zero knowledge between tenants is to provision entirely separate author and publish instances for each client project.

B: Component groups and allowedPaths are content governance features for organizing templates and components. They do not provide any isolation for code, users, or the underlying repository. C: This describes AEM's standard multi-tenancy model within a shared instance. It fails to meet the explicit requirements of "no shared code" and "no shared authors," as the instance itself is a shared resource.

1. Adobe Experience League, "AEM Multi Site Management Best Practices". This document outlines different approaches to multi-tenancy. It implicitly supports the concept of separate instances for maximum isolation by stating: "When you need to share nothing, not even the user accounts, the solution is to set up separate AEM instances." This directly validates that for zero sharing, separate instances are the required solution. (Accessed under AEM 6.5 Assets documentation).

2. Adobe Experience League, "AEM 6.5 Security Checklist - Segregation of Duties". This guide details how to use privileges and ACLs to create separation within an instance. It highlights that this is for separating roles and access to content paths, not for isolating entire codebases or user populations from each other, which is a key requirement of the question. This explains why Option C is insufficient for "true" multi-tenancy as defined in the scenario.

3. Adobe Experience League, "Recommended Deployments". The documentation on deployment architectures for AEM 6.5 shows that provisioning separate, independent environments (Author/Publish pairs) is a standard deployment pattern. This architectural choice is precisely what is needed to achieve the complete tenant isolation described in the question, where each tenant operates as a distinct entity.