1. ColdFusion On The Cloud
Amazon EC2 and S3
Presented by Denard CFMeetup Dec 22nd, 2011

2. Over 20 years IT & development experience
Sr. Software CF Webtools
Over 20 years IT & development experience
Java, Perl, PHP, C/C++
Hardware, network and storage engineering
CMMI process management & assessment
Over 10 years ColdFusion experience (v4.5)
Rich internet and mobile applications
Host of the Northern Virginia CFUG
@ddspringle

3. What is the ‘Cloud’?
Typically defined as a suite of services working together to provide virtualization, scalability and variable performance to hosted operating systems and applications.
Allows full control of your hosting environment from operating system to web server to database to network.
Allows for private networking, load balancing, instant-on provisioning, instant-on backups and more!
‘Cloud’ is often misrepresented by companies as a name for their virtualization service.
Virtualization != Cloud.

4. How to get Amazon Web Services
Go to and click ‘Sign-Up Now’
Follow the processes to enter your information, , etc. asked for by Amazon
Provide payment information (you will not be billed until you use the service)
AWS offers a Free Tier of service which provides one full year of hours to run an EC2 micro Amazon Linux instance, S3 storage and more for *new* clients only. If you already have an AWS account, you do not qualify.
An EC2 micro Amazon Linux instance and ~10G S3 storage costs about $15/mo total as of Dec 2011.

5. Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2)
Amazon’s computing platform, called EC2, provides nearly instant on Linux and Windows cloud servers of many different flavors and sizes
Highly secure environment with 256-bit AES encryption, helps meet PCI compliance for managing financial or sensitive information
Easily scale up or down, add or remove servers and load balancers, to handle higher traffic (e.g. Black Friday)
EC2 servers run in their own memory space – unlike many other cloud providers who share memory between cloud servers.

6. Creating your first instance.
Launch a new Amazon EC2 instance
Specify the operating system you want to use (Amazon Linux 32-bit in this case)
Specify the parameters of the cloud server to use
Specify the private keys you want to use, or create them
Specify the firewall settings you want to use, or create them (NOTE: You must open up the SSH port on Linux or the RDP port on Windows or you will not be able to access the server! You will also want to open HTTP/HTTPS ports.)
Confirm your settings and launch the instance
Demo this now 

7. Accessing EC2 from Windows
Download Putty.exe and PuttyGen.exe from the Putty Download Page
Download the security key you generated on Amazon Web Services – KEEP A COPY OF THIS KEY IN A SAFE PLACE!
Use PuttyGen.exe to convert the key to putty format (NOTE: the putty format also works with the FileZilla FTP client)
Launch Putty.exe and specify the key to use for the session or use a .bat file consisting of: X:\path\to\putty -i mykey.ppk
Copy and paste the connection information from Amazon Web Services (e.g.
Login to the Amazon Linux EC2 server with Putty
Demo this now 

8. Accessing EC2 from OSX/Linux
Open a terminal
Pass SSH the keyfile you downloaded from AWS:
> ssh –i mykey.pem
Enjoy.
NOTE: SCP also uses this same convention, for copying files to the server under OSX/Linux.
> scp –i mykey.pem …

9. Sudo – Super User Do
AWS Linux (all variants) are configured to allow the ec2-user sudo access to everything except passwd root
There is no ‘root’ user to log into. This is a safety measure that mitigates hacking and rootkit attempts
Any time you want to make a change to the file system (including copying, moving, downloading, installing or removing files/applications, etc.) you will need to use sudo
The only exception is within the ec2-user’s home directory, where you can perform any basic file system operations within that directory.

10. Yummy Yummy Yum
Yum (Yellowdog Updater Modified) is the package manager associated with numerous Linux distro’s, including CentOS, upon which Amazon Linux is based.
> sudo yum install <package to install> [ENTER] - installs packages from the repository
> sudo yum update [ENTER] – updates all installed packages with available updates
> yum list <wilcard search string> [ENTER] - lists installed and available packages
Sudo not required to list packages (no system changes)

11. First Steps with Amazon Linux
Amazon Linux comes as a fairly plain (locked down) server deployment, so, the first thing to do is ensure you’ve got the latest Apache build installed. Sudo is required.
> sudo yum install httpd [ENTER]
> sudo yum install httpd-devel [ENTER]
> sudo yum install libstdc++.so.5 [ENTER]
> sudo chkconfig httpd on [ENTER]
httpd-devel and libstdc++.so.5 are required by the ColdFusion installer
libstdc++.so.5 should always locate to the most recent libstdc++ available, if not, use: > yum find libstdc* to locate the correct package to install
Demo this now 

12. Next steps – acquire ColdFusion
Download ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion update:
NVCFUG S3 Hosted 32-Bit Linux ColdFusion Quick Start Package (**For deployment in US-EAST Zone only**)
Use wget (or similar utility) to download the gzip’d and tar’d quick start archive: > wget
Unpack the archive with tar: > tar xvzf AWS.EC2.i386.cf901.QuickStart.tar.gz [ENTER]
> cd cf901QuickStart [ENTER]
Demo this now 

13. Install ColdFusion 9 > sudo ColdFusion_9_WWE_Linux.bin [ENTER]
Hit [ENTER] a bunch to get through the license
Enter ‘y’ to agree to the license
Choose install type – developer, licensed or 30-day trial
Enter serial number, if applicable (licensed)
Choose ‘Server Configuration’ (other methods are supported, but we won’t cover those in this demo)
Specify if there is already a CF9 server installed (no)
Select or deselect components as needed
Start demo now 

14. Install ColdFusion 9, cont…
Choose the install folder. /opt/coldfusion9 is the default
Specify if earlier versions of CF are installed (no)
Add Web Server Configuration (option 1)
Choose Apache (option 1)
Specify location of the config file: /etc/httpd/conf
Specify the location of the binary: /usr/sbin/httpd
Specify the binary control file location: /etc/init.d/httpd

15. Install ColdFusion 9, cont…
Continue with installation (option 4)
Specify CF9 admin location (default /var/www/html)
Specify runtime user (nobody)
Skip OpenOffice configuration (unless needed)
Enter and confirm the admin password
Enable RDS and specify the RDS password
Confirm installation
Grab a beverage and wait, and wait, and wait
Once complete, DO NOT start the server… yet!

16. Configuring ColdFusion & Apache
CF *does not* properly update the apache_connector.sh file that get’s executed the first time ColdFusion starts when installing on Linux
Replace the CF created shell file with the one downloaded in the cf901QuickStart
> sudo cp –f apache_connector.sh /opt/coldfusion9/bin/connectors/ [ENTER]
Else, sudo vi /opt/coldfusion9/bin/connectors/apache_connector.sh [ENTER] and manually change the paths for the conf, binary and init files.

17. Starting ColdFusion And start ColdFusion
> sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion start [ENTER]
Tail the cfserver.log file to watch CF start
> tail -f /opt/coldfusion9/logs/cfserver.log [ENTER]
Hit CTRL-C to stop tailing the file when it’s done loading
Open the CF Administrator for the first time in a browser

18. Update to CF901 Stop Apache and ColdFusion
> sudo /etc/init.d/httpd stop [ENTER]
> sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion stop [ENTER]
> sudo ColdFusion_update_901_WWEJ_linux.bin [ENTER]
Runs exactly like the CF9 install, except all values will already be filled in. *Do not add another connector for Apache.*
Grab a beverage and wait, and wait, and wait

19. Restart Apache & CF Restart Apache and ColdFusion
> sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start [ENTER]
> sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion start [ENTER]
Tail the cfserver.log file to watch CF start
> tail -f /opt/coldfusion9/logs/cfserver.log [ENTER]
Hit CTRL-C to stop tailing the file when ColdFusion is done loading

20. Configure CF to start on boot
‘coldfusion’ file is an init script, you only have to copy it to the init directory and configure the system to start it:
> sudo cp /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion /etc/init.d/ [ENTER]
> sudo chkconfig --add coldfusion [ENTER]
That’s it. Your done. Grab a celebratory beverage!

21. Install MySQL (optional)
> sudo yum install mysql [ENTER]
> sudo yum install mysql-server [ENTER]
> sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start [ENTER]
Follow the instructions for adding a root user to MySQL shown on the console when MySQL starts the first time
Use mysqladmin to manage the database(s) or install PHP & PHPMyAdmin for a web based interface
Connect created database(s) through the ColdFusion administrator as normal

22. Simple Storage Service (S3)
CF9.0.1 uses Apache VFS to facilitate access to Amazon S3 buckets
You must use a script style Application.cfc to properly instantiate the S3 settings (caveat #1)
DirectoryExists() always returns false when trying to access Amazon S3 buckets (caveat #2)
DirectoryCreate() always works, even if there is already a bucket in existence (caveat #3)
Directory and File functions include the bucket path in the filename (caveat #4)

23. Application.cfc with S3 in CF
cfscript style CFC works
CFML style CFC fails
component { this.name="AmazonS3Demo"; //s3 info this.s3.accessKeyid = "<accessKey>"; this.s3.awsSecretKey = "<secretKey>"; }
<cfcomponent> <cfscript> this.name = "AmazonS3Demo"; <!--- s3 info ---> this.s3.accessKeyId = "<accessKey>"; this.s3.awsSecretKey = "<secretKey>"; </cfscript> </cfcomponent>
Alternative method of directly accessing S3 within code w/o initializing it in the Application.cfc:

24. Using S3 within ColdFusion
All file and directory tags and functions in CF work with Amazon S3
s3:// is the only difference between using these tags and functions to call a file on Amazon S3 and calling a local file (e.g. D:\, /var/www/)
Filenames will contain the full path to the file excluding the bucket. (e.g. instead of ‘myfile.jpg’ you will get ‘path/to/myfile.jpg’ as the name column and ‘s3://bucket/’ as the directory column).
As an aside, use ram:// in CF9.0.1 to use the local RAM drive with Apache VFS (configure VFS in CF Admin)
Demo this now 

25. Additional Resources Jeff Roberson’s CF & EC2 blog post
Willem Redelijkheid's blog post on installing CF on CentOS
CFMeetup "Replace Your Iron with a Cloud", with Barney Boisvert
Ray Camden’s Amazon S3 guide
Adobe’s S3 LiveDocs
NVCFUG S3 Demo Page
Download this presentation at: css.dvdmenubacks.com

26. The End