Rapid CQ deployments at your fingertips

AEM (CQ) deployments tend to take a lot of time and projects that take advantage of all its components usually make for very complex projects. Dozens of servers, many integration points and multiple environments may drive you mad if you'd like to keep a consistent state everywhere. Stop tearing your hair out to get the job done. Configuration management tools may save you a lot of time and frustration. I've used Chef (http://www.getchef.com/chef/) and it's magic to manage not only servers and core services, but also Adobe CQ and it's internals. At the end of the day the entire application stack can be reconstructed within minutes just from Chef's cookbooks, application backups and bare resources (metal or virtual).

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1. Rapid CQ deployments at your fingertips Jakub Wadolowski
2. About me • Systems Engineer @ Cognifide • Open source and Linux enthusiast • 3 years of experience with Adobe CQ • Chef user for over a year
3. Configuration management problem (1) • root@server:~# ls /etc/apache2/apache2* • /etc/apache2/apache2.conf • /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.OLD • /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.BAK • /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.20131201 • /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.orig.20130123 • …
4. Configuration management problem (2) DEV STAGING PROD
5. System integrity
6. Solutions! (1) • Manual configuration • Error-prone • Time consuming • Works until you have to deal with a several dozens of servers on a daily basis
7. Solutions! (2) • Golden images • Quite heavy • Hard to transfer between various autonomous systems • Hard to modify seamlessly • Hidden (and most probably undocumented) configuration details
8. Solutions! (3) • Configuration management • It’s all about the state of your servers/services • Treat your infrastructure as code • Define policy once, reuse everywhere • Reduce complexity • Reconstruct business from code repository, data backup and compute resources
9. Let’s cook something!
10. Chef core principles • Idempotence • Thick client, thin server • Order matters • Declarative • Convergent • Underlying technology agnostic
11. Chef overview • Chef server • Chef client • Workstation • Node • Cookbook • Recipes • Templates • Attributes • Resources • …
12. CQ Unix Toolkit cookbook • Installs specific version of CQ Unix Toolkit • Provides underlying tools for CQ cookbook
13. CQ cookbook • CQ installation • Internals management (users, packages, etc.)
14. CQ deployments with Chef (1) • Server provisioning • Users • Sudo settings • Common packages installation • Ulimit • SysVInit deamon • Monitoring • …
15. CQ deployments with Chef (2) • CQ installation • Install proper Java version • Download and unpack JAR file • Tune JVM settings • …
16. CQ deployments with Chef (3) • CQ management • Create CQ users • Configure replication agents • Install CRX packages • …
17. The power of Chef – JVM (1)
18. The power of Chef – JVM (2)
19. The power of Chef – JVM (3)
20. The power of Chef – CQ Users (1)
21. Demo time!
22. Why you should care? • Never hear 'works on my machine' again • Keep track of your CQ servers • Ability to recreate your infrastructure from scratch anytime you need it • Helps you scale horizontally • Rapid package deployments • Improved development workflow
23. Current status • Only CQ 5.6.x is supported • Full CQ installation • CQ JVM tuning • Run CQ as Linux daemon • User management • CRX package management
24. Roadmap • CQ users improvements (groups support) • New resources • cq_agent (replication & flush) • cq_bundle (OSGi configuration) • CQ 5.5 support • More automated tests • Public release within the next few weeks!
25. THANK YOU!