Liferay Cloud Services Beta

UPDATE: Liferay Cloud Services has a new name! See this blog post for details on Liferay Connected Services!

Today we are announcing an open Beta of Liferay Cloud Services! If you're interested in participating, check out the landing page - you won't be able to miss the big form on the right (there are only 50 slots left - hurry!).

What is Liferay Cloud Services?

"Liferay Cloud Services is a new online platform that offers tools and services that will help our customers suceed on Liferay projects."  That sounds great, right? So, for example, you have 10 Liferay servers in your farm - do you know if they are all up to date? Do you want to manually go through each one and update them? What if one is running low on memory - wouldn't it be great to get an alert on your mobile and correcting the issue instead of receiving an angry customer call an hour or two later?

LIferay Cloud Services will do all that - and more! The more: Fix Pack Management, Metrics, Dashboards, and Alerts. I won't ruin the surprise here, so please check out the Beta landing page to see more information about these. The best part is we can easily add new services without impacting existing services. It's all on the cloud!

Availability

Liferay Cloud Services will be available for systems running on 6.1 CE/EE GA3 or later (and of course 6.2 CE/EE GA1 or later). And yes, my community brothers and sisters, it is also available for Liferay CE (although limited, still very useful, otherwise I wouldn't be blogging about it here!) It also works with on-premesis or cloud deployments, so we can target the maximum number of kinds of deployments.

Beta Program

This beta program is intended find issues (what??), and get real feedback from real customers using it in an as-close-to-real-as-possible way. It also gives our community a way to interact directly with the product team(s) at Liferay, before it is finally launched. We learn a lot about our products from you, we rely on you to tell us what to fix, what to improve upon, and how to best meet your goals. In short, we cannot be successful without you, so we really need your help! The beta is a great way to do this, so I highly recommend you sign up. There are only 50 spots total, if you're interested, you should move quickly!

What's Next

The good news: it's a cloud-based service, and the team is looking at a range of new features to offer to you - not only health services, but also processing services (e.g. offline video transcoding), more analytics, and others. So get involved in the Beta today and see what it can do for your Liferay deployments!

Blogs
Hi James,

Thanks for informing about the much awaited Liferay Cloud Services. This will be a real good feature for live monitoring of the deployed Liferay Servers. Thanks.

Ahamed Hasan
Author, Liferay Cookbook
I tried it out last night with Liferay 6.2 CE. The installation went very smooth. A job well done!

What are the difference between the features for CE and EE? Is it only the fix-pack functionality?
Hi Wouter
Yes, for now the only different feature is Fix Pack management.
Glad you liked it! I'll contact you again to discuss about your experience and things we can improve to make it even better.
Thanks for your kind words!
Juan
Besides the fix pack management there are some very useful metrics around resource useage for portlets and other metrics which could help us monitor and tune. For Tomcat we use visualVM but memory profiling (remotely) is a challenge and we don't want to instrument and/or run anything directly on our PROD server .. so this solution is very interesting.
We are sure that this would open gate for many Liferay users/sysadmins who urge to manage/deploy multiple liferay servers in a farm to be part of such solution
Good to get all servers at single point information. Really very helpful and time saving for Multi-Server Environment.
Sounds very interesting, thanks for sharing!

Unfortunatly when I try to authorize a server I get an error about a Revoked certificate (error code: sec_error_revoked_certificate) and I can go further. Is it my problem?
Hi Marco! Thanks for testing Liferay Cloud Services Beta!
The issue you report apparently happens to Firefox users and a fix is on the way.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can do the following trick: In the browser options there is an option that says "Query OCSP responder servers to confirm the current validity of certificates" which is checked in your case. You need to uncheck it to make LCS work. Can you please test this fixes your issue while we fix it in our platform? Thanks,
Juan
Thanks Juan, now it works great!

Would be great if I could integrate my custom portlet in metrics/server details
Ciao Marco: not a bad idea!
It is not in our current plans, but we could consider that for the future. In the mean time: what else would you like to see in metrics/server details? What do you think is missing? Maybe we could add it and benefit our whole community...
Thanks for the feedback!
Juan