Alfresco on AWS
Provisioning and deploying Alfresco solutions on
Amazon Web Services
Advantages Of The Cloud
What is the cloud?
Our Definition
• “The Cloud” is a massively overloaded term
• Here, we are using it to refer to virtualised
infrastructure, wrapped in an easy-to-use web
service API
• Infrastructure as a Service
• Can be private (See OpenStack & Ubuntu) as well
as public
What is the cloud?
The Wider Sense
• Storing something “in the cloud” has come to refer
to using network-accessible resources to store
objects (usually files)
• Marketing around the cloud has created a very
broad definition, companies and products
previously operating in the Internet are now part of
the cloud
How can it help us?
Advantages
• Infinite resources
• Pay as you go model – no capital expenditure on
infrastructure
• Geographically distributed
• Rapid scalability
• Provisioning speed – new machines can be
provisioned and deployed to almost instantly
How can it help us?
Disadvantages
• Actual hardware is managed by a third-party in a
central location – issues with this hardware can
cause outages
• Provisioned instances don’t have concrete
hardware specifications, and so sizing architectures
can be difficult
• Privacy – Some industries have legislative
restrictions on how and where they store data
How can it help us?
Alfresco
• Alfresco Cloud – the ultimate example of a
successful Alfresco AWS deployment
• Client solutions – Allows the infrastructure behind
their Alfresco solution to grow as they do
• Cost savings – A move to operational expenditure
reduces the risk of a deployment
• Loaded with content – Alfresco manages content
effectively, the cloud can help ensure that that
content is distributed efficiently, securely and
reliably
AWS
The AWS console
AWS Services
• EC2 - Pay-as-you-go (or reserved) compute power,
delivered as a virtual server, with a number of premade OS images to install
• S3 - Storage service, accessible over HTTP
• EBS - Hard drive image service, disconnecting
instances from their data
• VPC - A virtual private cloud, providing VLAN-like
control of network segments, and a VPN option
DevOps
DevOps
What is it?
• A methodology that makes collaboration the highest
priority, to ensuring development and operations
teams can deliver software quickly and efficiently
How does it relate to the cloud?
• Tools, like Puppet and Chef, have been built to help
Developers and Operations get on the same page
• IaaS environments create a juicy target for these
tools
• Automation means issues get resolved quicker, and
we can do things like auto scaling!
Puppet
What is puppet?
Service Orchestration
• Puppet is a resource-oriented method of specifying
what you want your nodes to look like
• The how of ensuring a given node looks like its
specification is taken care of by puppet
• Resources in the node specification typically take
the form of abstracted concepts, such as a
“service”, a “file”, a “mount” etc.
Back to front?
Puppet
Master
Puppet
Certificate
Authority
1
3
Puppet Agents
Puppet
Puppet Agents
Agents
2
The Puppet Agent drives updates
• On every node in an environment, the puppet agent
needs to be installed
• This agent discovers the master from DNS
Resource driven
•
•
•
•
[Tomcat must be installed]
[Tomcat must be started]
[Imagemagick must be installed]
[alfresco-global.properties must have these values:
dir.root=/opt/alfresco
swf.dir=/opt/alfresco/swf
]
• [The alfresco and share webapps must exist,
copied from this location: /opt/puppet]
Alfresco manifest snippet – pt1
service { 'tomcat6':
ensure => 'running',
enable => true,
require => [
Augeas['alfresco-global.properties'],
Package['tomcat6'],
File['/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps'], ]
}
Alfresco manifest snippet – pt2
augeas { 'custom-log4j.properties':
incl =>
'/var/lib/tomcat6/shared/classes/alfresco/exte
nsion/log4j.properties',
lens => 'Properties.lns',
context => '/files/log4j.properties',
load_path => '/etc/augeas',
changes => [
"set log4j.appender.File.File
/var/log/tomcat6/alfresco.log"
],
notify => Service['tomcat6']
}
Provisioning from the command line
puppet node_aws bootstrap --image=ami-f9231b8d --type=m1.medium -keyname=gatewaykey --login=ec2-user --keyfile=/home/ec2user/.ssh/gatewaykey.pem --puppet-version=2.7.14 --puppetagentcertname=cms3.ixxus.co.uk --region=eu-west-1 --tags=Name=cms3 -subnet=subnet-6c033205
notice: Creating new instance ...
notice: Creating new instance ... Done
notice: Creating tags for instance ...
notice: Creating tags for instance ... Done
notice: Launching server i-49327f01 ...
##########################################################################
#########################################################################
##########
notice: Server i-49327f01 is now launched
notice: Server i-49327f01 public dns name: , private ip: 10.0.0.56
notice: Waiting for SSH response ...
notice: Waiting for SSH response ... Done
notice: Installing Puppet ...
notice: Puppet is now installed on: 10.0.0.56
notice: No classification method selected
notice: Signing certificate ...
notice: Signing certificate ... Done
Alfresco on AWS - Opportunities
What can we do?
Opportunities
• Auto scaling – CloudWatch, New Relic, Nagios and
other monitoring / APM tools can help you trigger
actions when load hits specified limits
• These actions can include provisioning new instances in
AWS
• An Alfresco Admin Console for AWS
• Show the current status of the whole environment
• Trigger actions to provision more servers
• Historical usage statistics
• Much, much more!
Cloud Challenges
Infrastructure setup
DNS
• EC2 on it’s own
doesn’t help with
persistent
addressability
• Depending on
architecture, you
may need a way to
address nodes after
a stop/start
VPC
• Security
requirements may
mandate the use of a
VPC
• VPCs are great, but
leave you in charge
of network setup
• They give you sticky
IPs
VPC beginnings...
Internet
External tier
Gateway
Internal tier
CMS
Search
Incoming route
Outgoing route
XML
RDBMS
Transform.
Infrastructure setup
Images
• Another question of
cloud architecture
• Do you bootstrap
from nothing, have a
base image, or
maintain images for
all of your services?
Storage
• EBS provides a
quick answer, but
reliability concerns
need to be
considered
• Puppet artefact
storage
• S3 (alfresco-cloudstore)?
Puppet challenges
Automated provisioning and certificates
• Often, the ability automatically deploy a node, or an
entire environment is highly desirable
• One option is node_aws
• Setup of a Puppet Master is often required before
automated provisioning can begin
• Puppet Master needs to automatically sign each
new node
• The ability to resolve DNS internally is useful here
Puppet challenges
Code
Artefact development
• At Ixxus, we
primarily use Maven
(with some Ant and
Gradle thrown in)
• How do we get our
developed artefacts
from CI to our
application servers?
JAR
WAR
Repository
Puppet “File”
resource
Application
Server
Thanks!
Further reading
• http://docs.puppetlabs.com/guides/cloud_pack_gett
ing_started.html
• http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/
• http://code.google.com/p/alfresco-cloud-store/
• http://newrelic.com/
• http://augeas.net/
Questions?