Liferay Portal CE Clustering Returns

I’m happy to announce we will be returning out of the box support for clustering with the release of Liferay Portal 7.1 CE GA3.

Bryan H Cheung

December 11, 2018

A Minute Read

Background

Last fall we reintroduced the option to use clustering in Liferay 7.0 by compiling a series of modules manually and including them in your project. We received a lot of feedback that this was a very cumbersome process and didn’t really provide the benefits we intended in bringing back clustering.

Enable Clustering

Beginning with Liferay Portal 7.1 CE GA3, clustering can now be enabled just like previously in Liferay Portal 6.2 CE. The official documentation covers the steps needed to enable clustering in GA3. To enable clustering, set the property:

cluster.link.enabled=true

Successfully enabling clustering will result in the following message in the logs on startup:

------------------------------------------------------------------- 
GMS: address=oz-52865, cluster=liferay-channel-control, physical address=192.168.1.10:50643 
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Other Steps We Are Taking for the Community

Restoring clustering is one of many steps we are taking to restore faith between Liferay and our community. Other initiatives to improve the developer experience with Liferay include:

More GA releases of Liferay Portal CE to improve stability and quality
A single-core model for Liferay Commerce, making open source Liferay Commerce installations compatible with our subscription services
Better support for headless use of Liferay with front-end frameworks
Improved experience with documentation, including unifying all available documentation and best practices in a single place
Additional ways to use portions of Liferay Portal’s functionality (such as permissioning or forms) in non-Liferay applications (e.g. those built with SpringBoot)

We’ll be providing more information about each of these initiatives in the weeks to come.

Conclusion

I want to thank you again for sticking with Liferay all these years as we’ve sorted out our business model (and sometimes made poor decisions along the way). I’m excited for the chance to invest in and grow our community in the coming months. It is what sets us apart from the competition and is truly one of the most rewarding parts of what we do at Liferay. We hope fully reintroducing clustering to be the first step towards achieving this goal and as always would love to hear what you think in the comments below.

16 Comments

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I think this is great news and am really looking forward having it packaged once again, rather than split out on its own. The other items on your list are also exciting and, for me, just another example of how Liferay LISTENS to its users and takes the requests of the user and development community into consideration. It has been a couple of rough years, sure, but I think everyone can admit that we have all taken the wrong fork in the road at some point in our lives. Kudos to Liferay and their team for having the courage to recognize some of the decisions that were less popular and taking the right steps (no matter how difficult) to correct the course. Thanks for sharing Bryan.

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Great news Bryan! I'm so excited about the future with Liferay; this is the kind of stuff that's makes me proud to be part of Liferay Community!

Thanks again for the effort, the passion and also for the courage that's drive choices like this one!

I hope that the new GA will be available soon!!

Regards, JF

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I remember, back to my Liferay times not so long ago, showing my disagreement about the cluster removal decision for Liferay CE, and of course telling the same to you, Bryan.

I am very happy about getting things back to "normal" again, and those improvements towards community (community Liferay Commerce compatible with Liferay DXP etc).

Good times ahead!

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Hi everyone,

GA3 is being prepped for release *tentatively* for mid to late January.

Thanks to all of you for the encouragement. Andrew—loved your talk at DevCon and hearing your story. Jader—thanks for letting me tell your story to so many people around the world. :) Juan, always happy to see you're still engaged with the community. Thank you!

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BIG UPVOTE for CE Cluster . Great news!

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aaa

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Thank you liferay.

I think liferay platform should keep open.

Increasing the Market Share is the object.

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Thanks Bryan for sharing the vision and what is coming for the whole community. I believe that all this things help Liferay to be widely adopted, used and improved in the short time!

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By the way, will be reintroduced JGroups support too?

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Even if that is not the case I will add JGroups support (have a branch For that un 7.0.x)

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Thanks Bryan and to Liferay team for the efforts to bring back Clustering in OOB this was much need feature for CE.

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I recently was invited to visit at the home of a family that has not been in Canada for long. I wrote to a friend about the experience saying "their capability for creating a community of belonging is beautiful."

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This is great start. The only question I have is will portal also move to single core model? Single stable core portal is what I'd like to see. Now of course then choosing which parts should be available only to subscribers will be hard thing to balance. I still see a lot of potential with Liferay but only thing that really bugs me is quality. I think single core and more community involvement would eventually solve that issue since both community and Liferay would benefit from it.

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