1. Alfresco on AWS Provisioning and deploying Alfresco solutions on Amazon Web Services

2. Advantages Of The Cloud

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. AWS

9. The AWS console

10. AWS Services EC2 - Pay-as-you-go (or reserved) compute power, delivered as a virtual server, with a number of pre- made 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

11. DevOps

12. 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!

13. Puppet

14. 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.

15. Back to front? 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 Puppet Agents Puppet Master Puppet Certificate Authority Puppet Agents 1 2 3

16. 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]

17. Alfresco manifest snippet – pt1 service { 'tomcat6': ensure => 'running', enable => true, require => [ Augeas['alfresco-global.properties'], Package['tomcat6'], File['/var/lib/tomcat6/webapps'], ] }

18. 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'] }

19. Provisioning from the command line puppet node_aws bootstrap --image=ami-f9231b8d --type=m1.medium -- keyname=gatewaykey --login=ec2-user --keyfile=/home/ec2- user/.ssh/gatewaykey.pem --puppet-version=2.7.14 --puppetagent- certname=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

20. Alfresco on AWS - Opportunities

21. 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!

22. Cloud Challenges

23. 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

24. VPC beginnings... Gateway Internet External tier Internal tier CMSSearchXMLRDBMSTransform. Incoming route Outgoing route

25. 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-cloud- store)?

26. 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

27. Puppet challenges 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? Code JAR WAR Puppet “File” resource Repository Application Server

28. 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/

29. Questions?