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Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 43

Join Date: November 10, 2008

I just wanted to start a thread regarding Liferay and cloud computing environments. I'm wondering about the issues of running Liferay in a cloud computing environment such as:

Amazon EC2
Google App Engine

I'm especially interested in low cost cloud environments such as Google App Engine - for a small fry developer such as myself, it would be nice to have free usage up to a certain quota. I'm also interested in platform as a service offerings making it easy for me to install and get my application going. I would expect Liferay not to work on GAE as it is currently configured - unless someone can state otherwise.

RE: Liferay and Clouds

June 27, 2009 9:51 AM

Answer

Ahmed Hasan

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 115

Join Date: April 13, 2007

Hi,

I am hasan, CTO of mPower Labs, a company working on Liferay for past 4 years.

We are successfully hosting Liferay on Amozon EC2 instances based on Ubuntu 9.04 Linux distro.

We have created the appropriate AMI with all out-of-the-box features.

Very soon, we'll be making our Amozon AMI public.

Now we are exploring the option of hosting Liferay on GAE.

Since this is a niche research area we are looking for like minded people to work together.

If you are interested, we'd like to work very closely with you.

Our plan is to launch our public Liferay AMI next month.

For any help feel free to contact me,

Ahmed Hasan
CTO, TransIT mPower Labs (P) Ltd.
info@mpowerglobal.com
mPower Global Inc.
A Liferay expert company.

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

June 28, 2009 3:34 AM

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Rank: Expert

Posts: 328

Join Date: July 7, 2008

Hi!

From my expereince I do not see any problem with running Liferay on Amazon EC2 (of course, prepeare full-functional AMI require some additional effort).

But I'm very skeptic about Liferay on GAE - major problem I see here - is database level: Liferay strongly related to Hibernate, and GAE provided JPA & JDO interfaces to store data. Plus, GAE has limited support for JPA (not all features are supported) - mostly it is because it has non-SQL database in background.

But, in any case it will be very interesting to see any results in this direction. If you like - I can try to provide some support in this job

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

June 28, 2009 6:14 AM

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Ahmed Hasan

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 115

Join Date: April 13, 2007

Hi,

It is going to be an exciting exercise to host Liferay on GAE.

I am trying to put the basic LR WAR file that comes bundled with HSQL. With all the dependency JAR files available within this WAR file, it should work. Still i am facing some initial hiccups (out of memory issues). I am trying to redeploy after increasing the size of some resources on the machine (though this is paid). I will update you once i am successful in this.

I agree with the challenges with database. One solution i am thinking of is to have a common database server hosted on Amazon EC2. We can make our LR application to point to that database. So, physically the database will be on a different server and LR will be hosted on GAE.

Will get back to you soon.

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

June 28, 2009 12:15 PM

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Rank: Expert

Posts: 328

Join Date: July 7, 2008

Hi!

Using some external DB - probably a way, but, without using own Google DB - I don't think running Liferay in GAE will have any practical reason - since, even with using scalability on Application-Server level (with using GAE) - we will lost it's scalability on DB level (provided then GAE DB is used)

Anyway - it is very interesting project and I will be happy to see any positive result!

Good luck in your job!

With best regards,
Alexey Kakunin

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

June 30, 2009 5:02 PM

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Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 43

Join Date: November 10, 2008

Unfortunately, I probably can't provide any immediate help right now since it was more of a genuine interest - and I don't have the necessary background in Liferay and GAE yet. I am planning to look into this in the future once I get my project to the point of integrating my Seam project with Liferay and GAE. Once I get to it, I'll post anything if I learn anything of interest that would help people.

And if you learn anything, please let us know! I'm sure many people would be interested!

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

June 30, 2009 5:04 PM

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Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 43

Join Date: November 10, 2008

Isn't Liferay moving to JPA soon - and in theory, shouldn't that work with Google DB then?

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

July 5, 2009 9:27 AM

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Posts: 328

Join Date: July 7, 2008

Please, note, even it is possible to run RichFaces portlets under Liferay, Seam is not still fully supported and you may meet many problems with Seam and Liferay

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

July 5, 2009 10:15 PM

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Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 43

Join Date: November 10, 2008

Hmm, thanks for the info. I'm actually planning to use IceFaces rather than RichFaces. Nevertheless, are there any issues with Seam and Liferay I should know about? Liferay has been extremely vague in this area. Liferay says it's compatible with Seam, but I have to wonder if there are any issues with scope (conversation, etc.), page actions, etc. And I'm also planning to use JBpm and JBoss Cache. Maybe I'm getting myself in too deep with all these dependencies? emoticon

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

July 6, 2009 7:18 AM

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Posts: 328

Join Date: July 7, 2008

I play with seam and liferay about year ago - major problem was - even I was able to make bi-injection working in Seam & Portlet, I was not able to store long-term conversations. It looks like - seam keep conversation info by passing conversation as argument between different url-requests - and this information missed then we work in portlet mode.

As example - you can also checks exadel seam demo: http://liferay.exadel.com/web/guest/home
For me it looks like it is not working (I cannot perform even search) - but, probably I miss something and it is already working well

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

July 6, 2009 1:38 PM

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Posts: 43

Join Date: November 10, 2008

Thanks for the link. I just tried the Exadel/Seam/Liferay demo and it does not work for me either. I cannot perform a search. Yikes. I wish someone from Liferay could write about this issue. I certainly don't want to use JBoss Portal and I want to keep using IceFaces. Hopefully, the new WebBeans spec will force everyone to adopt the Seam-like features and things will be much more compatible in the future - but it would still be nice to have Seam compatibility right now (who knows WebBeans will be fully implemented...).

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

August 23, 2009 11:43 PM

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Oliver Lauer

Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 83

Join Date: September 16, 2006

Did you succeed in porting LR to GAE?
Cheers
Oliver

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

September 2, 2009 11:34 PM

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Ahmed Hasan

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 115

Join Date: April 13, 2007

It was an exercise in futile. Inspite of repeated attempts we could not succeed in putting LR on GAE.

For any help feel free to contact me,

Ahmed Hasan
CTO, TransIT mPower Labs (P) Ltd.
info@mpowerglobal.com
mPower Global Inc.
A Liferay expert company.

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

September 4, 2009 3:55 PM

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Jinesh Varia

Rank: New Member

Posts: 4

Join Date: September 6, 2007

Were you able to deploy liferay successfully on Amazon EC2 in a true clustered fashion using their loadbalancing, autoscaling features. We would love to know more.

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

September 8, 2009 3:34 AM

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Madhu Yadav

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 115

Join Date: January 23, 2009

is the liferay ami publicly available?

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

October 5, 2009 4:42 PM

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Frank Yu

Rank: New Member

Posts: 14

Join Date: June 30, 2008

Madhu Yadav:

is the liferay ami publicly available?

I don't know if it is publicly available. It is straight forward to build one using AMI command line tools. In our case, we deployed Liferay in Amazon EC2 with the following matrix and created our own bundles:

Debian
Liferay Portal SE (both 5.1.1 and 5.2.3)
OracleXE or MySQL
Tomcat 6.0.18

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

January 11, 2010 3:44 PM

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Rank: Junior Member

Posts: 43

Join Date: November 10, 2008

Hi Alexey,

It looks as though the Liferay/Seam/Richfaces portal is working again at the link you gave me... So that's a good sign.

BTW, I've been looking into Liferay 5.2.3/Seam 2.2 GA/ICEfaces 1.8.2/Facelets/JBoss 5.0.0GA (I'm not using the Liferay supplied JBoss package, but just following the instructions given in the administration guide to put the Liferay wars into JBoss 5 and the other instructions) and have gotten it to work. I used the Seam component showcase Liferay/JBoss deployment example in ICEfaces 1.8.2 as a template. I also used Seam gen to generate the war project - and after only making a few changes, I was able to get things to work.

I've been pleasantly surprised how well things are going. I'm doing a preliminary investigation on it and things seem to be working. Conversation propagation seems to be working fine - I used a simple example to test. I put <begin-conversation join="true"/> in my <page_name>.pages.xml file for the subsequent page. (Page navigation using pages.xml or <page_name>.pages.xml seems to be working). I have a button that executes a simple action that goes to the next page for the portlet. I check the conversation ID as I move from the first page to the second page and the conversation ID stays the same. So far, everything is working fine. I'm sure page parameters won't work because of the need to do POST requests instead of GET requests, but I can live without that feature for now. But simple things seem to be working fine. I'm sure as I go further along I'll find a few bugs, but I am pleasantly surprised for now. I have some hope.

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

January 12, 2010 2:15 AM

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Rank: Expert

Posts: 328

Join Date: July 7, 2008

You can try this ami: http://emforge.net/web/akakunin/blogs/-/blogs/liferay-5-2-3-amazon-ec2-image-ami

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

January 12, 2010 3:01 AM

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Posts: 328

Join Date: July 7, 2008

zzzz8 zzzz8:

Isn't Liferay moving to JPA soon - and in theory, shouldn't that work with Google DB then?

Yes, 5.3 should support JPA, but I'm still very sceptic about it - reading current documetation - only EclipseLink supported as JPA provider (even Hibernate is not working) - so, not sure it will work with GAE JPA provider - since it have too many restrictions

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

February 17, 2010 8:24 PM

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Madhu Yadav

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 115

Join Date: January 23, 2009

Thanks for your efforts. It will be really helpful..
Will let you know once I try it emoticon

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

July 15, 2010 6:35 PM

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Sohui Gu

Rank: Regular Member

Posts: 110

Join Date: July 6, 2006

Focus on it!!

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

August 18, 2010 10:59 AM

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Jessica Irani

Rank: New Member

Posts: 1

Join Date: August 18, 2010

hi,

could you please tell me if teh following technology stack together will work on the amazon cloud or any other cloud liek azure, google, etc. priority on amazon and google.

Component Implementation
Presentation LifeRay Portal

Application server JBoss Server

Database MySQL

Development tools Eclipse or NetBeans

Operating System Red Hat Linux

Search software Lucene

Analytics Google Analytics

CMS Alfresco

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

August 18, 2010 11:40 AM

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Samuel Liu

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Expert

Posts: 301

Join Date: May 27, 2010

Hi Jessica,

Liferay should work on Amazon (AWS) from what people have been describing. We have support for JBoss, MySQL, we use Lucene, we hook into Alfresco, and Google Analytics should work fine. So all in all, I don't see why this wouldn't work emoticon

Eclipse/Netbeans would be a strictly developer-side thing and not related to the server, but both of those have been used very commonly with liferay as well. We also have a Liferay IDE now, which is simply eclipse with a specialized Liferay development plugin hook.

Good luck with setting up the stack!

Warm regards,
Sam

Miguel Angel Salinas Gancedo

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

November 15, 2010 5:38 AM

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Rank: New Member

Posts: 1

Join Date: September 17, 2010

I installed Liferay in an Ubuntu lucid small esb instance on Amazon Web Services succesfully, but we want to outsource the must data of the liferay to an independent esb volume of amazon.

My question is:

We can install all liferay standalone in this new esb volume and attach it to the esb instance and reconfigure mysql to put the data file in this volumen?

Or what is the best configuration to install liferay and use a persistent esb volumen attached to a esb instance?

Best regards.

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

January 27, 2011 11:28 PM

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ly tm

Rank: New Member

Posts: 13

Join Date: December 12, 2010

- Hi everybody!
- I'am newbie in portal environment.
- I have a web application written in java using JSF and RichFaces, how can convert it into portlets running on Liferay Portal.
- Hope to get help from the experts.
- Thanks so much!

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

May 24, 2011 1:29 AM

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Ján Ondrušek

Rank: New Member

Posts: 9

Join Date: April 26, 2009

Hello! I was wondering if this issue (running Liferay - currently 6.0.x on GAE) is still active.
I'm seriously thinking of trying this as my Master Thesis here at CTU in Prague as Cloud Computing is a great fashion nowadays.

Would anyone still be interested in this or willing to help? emoticon

Thanks!

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

May 25, 2011 11:53 AM

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James Falkner

LIFERAY STAFF

Rank: Liferay Master

Posts: 550

Join Date: September 17, 2010

Check out my recent post about Liferay on Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. There are many improvements that could be made, which might be good for your Thesis!

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RE: Liferay and Clouds

October 8, 2011 6:10 AM

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Ján Ondrušek

Rank: New Member

Posts: 9

Join Date: April 26, 2009

And some more (hopefully good) news about GAE.

Google now offers Google Cloud SQL for Google App Engine, which offers

capabilities of a MySQL database