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Liferay Cloud Services has a new name!

Juan Fernández

March 18, 2015

A Minute Read

Dear community:

I'd like to make an important announcement today.

I've been presenting and demoing Liferay Cloud Services at Symposiums, events and customer visits for quite some time now, and most of those presentations had one thing in common: before I presented the product, people thought it was about a hosted or managed platform. “No, no, no. These are *Cloud-based services*, meaning the services we are offering RESIDE in the cloud...not that YOUR server resides in the cloud”...man, I have explained it so many times!

If you launch a product and you constantly need to explain what it does, because the name is confusing...then you have a problem! So we have been thinking about this, and we have finally decided to change the product name to one that is better prepared for the future and is less confusing for our customers. So the goal of this blog post is to say bye-bye to Liferay Cloud Services and …

Welcome to Liferay Connected Services!

Why did we decide to call it that? Well...it’s quite straightforward: we are offering added-value services and the only thing our customers need to unleash the power of this product is just connect it to their on-premise or cloud-based portals.

For those who still don’t know what these services are, Liferay Connected Services are an online platform that offers a set of tools and services that will help our customers succeed on their Liferay projects.

The services that we are currently offering are the following:

Page, portlet and server metrics
Cache insights
Fix pack and security updates management

And yes, all for free! These are the services we are offering as of today, but we are planning to release many many more in the future. We want YOU to have a 360º view of your portal

“But...is that all you have for us on this update?”

Not at all! We have more good news! Since we launched the first beta, our users asked for an email notifications system that would warn them when something’s wrong with their servers… and here is the first version of the email notifications service!

Now you can configure for each project, environment or server if you want to receive an email alert when a new LCS client, fix pack or patching tool version is available, when a server goes down, when monitoring is unavailable or the patching tool is not correctly functioning. Helpful, right? :)

What's next? If you want to try these services, you can do so in just three simple steps:

Sign up using your liferay.com account at lcs.liferay.com
There, in your personal dashboard, download the LCS Client
Install it in your server

Are you ready?

Or check out the Liferay Connected Services page for more information, testimonials and FAQs

Best,

Juan Fernández

7 Comments

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Is it possible to use this "without connection to the internet"? I mean, with a local LCS Server?

Some of my customers are quite restrictive and whatever the name of the service, don't want to upload any server metrics/data, no matter what they are, to some server outside of the company.

Sure, checking for patches is necessary, but that should be handled by the local LCS server.

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Hi Christoph:
I am sorry, but for now we don't plan to offer LCS on premise. If we see there's customer demand for this, in the future we might analyze the opportunity, but as of today we plan to continue growing as an online platform.
Thanks for your feedback!
Juan

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I agree 100% with Christoph Rabel. We will have a very hard time trying to convince our security department to allow us to use a Cloud Service that can expose a lot of sensitive data from our infrastructure, if this Cloud Service is ever breached. Just imagine the damage that an attacker can do after accessing any company's LCS panel.
Thus, I strongly suggest Liferay to rethink the strategy and allow the customers to have a local LCS server.

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Thanks Juan, nice blog and explanation.

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Hello Juan,

I like the possibilities of LCS. Especially it is easy to get an overview of the status of all your Liferay Servers.

I think it would be useful if you cannot only manage Updates and Fix Packs in LCS, but also your custom portlets. I would think of an overview page where you can see all installed portlets (with version information) for every Liferay Server. So if you have multiple Servers which share the same custom portlets you can get an easy overview if every Server has the latest version. Additionally it could be useful to install or update custom portlets to any server directly from LCS.

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Thanks Juan. Few questions:

1. Does it use JMX to fetch this data? If JMX is disabled, would I be able to see these statistics?

2. How does it differ from what I can see right now from Managed Beans with any tool like VisualVM? The proper question would be what all additional info I would be able to see apart from what I'm able to see currently with MBeans?

3.With LCS, would I be able to see these statistics in lcs.liferay.com only? Or it there a way to monitor this on portal itself? Since I agree with what @Chrisoph Rabel has to say about customers? They are quire restrictive on what is shared outside?

Thanks,
Jay

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