Radio Liferay Episode 39: Liferay Cloud Services

 \o/ Radio Liferay is back. A while ago I talked with Juan Fernandez and Ivica Čardić about an exciting project they're collaborating on: Liferay Cloud Services. "What's this?" you ask? Well, good that you're asking, because here's the explanation. It's all about helping you monitor the health of your Liferay Installation, keeping an eye on the installed fixpacks (if you're using EE) or showing you some monitoring information that the server provides and you'd otherwise risk not to see.

(The episode is prefixed with a PSA for all Radio Liferay Listeners: The CfP for Devcon2014 is still open until 22. Aug 2014) and if you intend to come to the unconference on 4. Nov., make sure to register early: We have limited space and already predict that we'll sell out the unconference - there are enough seats available for the regular DevCon)

Juan is a project manager on this very project, working in Spain. Ivica is Senior Software Engineer, implementing LCS with the engineering team (Marko Čikoš and Igor Bešlić) in Croatia. I delayed publishing this episode to wait for the end of the private beta (you couldn't join anyway) until the public beta is just about to start.

We talked about

  • How LCS got started and what problems it solves (this is work in progress, designed for constantly added functionality)
  • (among the current information shown are things like: Performance metrics on JVM- and portal/portlet level, Fixpack information (EE only) and -installation.
  • The public beta is just around the corner (estimated in September). Test results from the private beta are in and lots of feature requests implemented (I can certify on that - some of them are mine)
  • Intended new features, to be added over time
  • New target audiences (currently it's largely system administrators, but content managers, e.g. for content targetting statistics, could be a possible future extension)
  • For the nerds, we talked about how LCS is implemented under the hood, and the mechanics of targetting Liferay 6.1 and 6.2 at the same time.
  • ...and others - but listen yourself...

Follow @RadioLiferay or @olafk (me) on twitter

Again, shoutout and big thank you to Auphonic for postproduction help. This is a fantastic service!

You'll find this episode - and make sure that you don't miss any of the future episodes - by subscribing to  http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioLiferay. You can also subscribe on itunes.: Just search for "Radio Liferay" or just "Liferay" in the podcast directory.

Or just download the MP3 here:

download audio file

博客
Hello Olaf,

in the episode you talked about that the Liferay Cloud Services would go into public beta by the end of june. However they are still not accessible for public. Do you have any new dates when it will be available?

Another question: You talked about that you were doing some performance / load tests with your Liferay servers. Can you tell us which tools you used to do your load and performance tests?
I think I missed mentioning that the private beta was extended, thus the public beta got delayed as well. Last I heard was "beginning of September" as the time to start the public beta: They're currently adding features and provisioning, so that the rush of new participants can easily be handled.

I used JMeter for the tests. As it was used to demonstrate tuning, not to optimize actual performance, I deliberately created a slow portal, that would break even under low load (e.g. portlets with long rendering times etc.)

The result/procedure/aspects of the performance test has been presented at the french symposium, you can find the material there: https://www.liferay.com/france2014/ . Typically we'd use grinder for load tests, but JMeter is more visual, and it's easier to explain JMeter UI in a presentation than python code. You can also find screenshots of the Cloud-Services private beta features there.