OpenCms Days 2012 - The Dispatch - Running OpenCms 8 on Amazon cloud services

OpenCms:
Amazon Web
Services (AWS)

The Presenters
David Landreman
Web Services IT Manager
Email: dlandreman@dispatch.com
Twitter: @GraphIt2000
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlandreman

Andrew Roth
Senior Internet Development Engineer
Email: aroth@dispatch.com
Twitter: @guitarplayinpro
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rothandrew

 Newspapers, weekly periodicals, TV stations, and radio
stations in Columbus, Ohio, USA
 23 websites hosted on Amazon in OpenCMS 8
 http://www.dispatch.com
 http://www.10tv.com
 Millions of pageviews daily
 5 Years of content
 700,000 HTML files
 1.5 Million Resources (images, video metadata, etc.)
 NginX Web Tier (4 Servers)
 Tomcat 7 App Tier (4 Servers)

OpenCms Customizations
 Over 40 custom modules developed
 Advanced RSS Feeds
 Video Support
 XML Content Editor Changes
 Content Relationship Engine (CRE)
 Custom User Administration Tools
 Solr Search Integration
 Workplace UI Enhancements
 Advanced Properties Dialog
 Shortcuts Bar

Custom RSS Feed Module
 More than content management for websites
 Amazon Kindle
 Native iPhone / Android Apps
 Facebook Pages
 Support for value lookup in nested resources
 E.g. Story Resource includes VFS path to Author
and the RSS should include author’s twitter
handle
 Filtering by content type
 Easily Extendable
 Media RSS for Video feeds
 GeoRSS

Video Support
 Video management completely inside
OpenCms for content editors
 Admin tools
 Uploading new videos
 Viewing transcode status
 Integration with RSS module for MRSS feeds
 Automatic video thumbnail generation
 Thumbnail added to VFS
 Only video metadata is stored in OpenCms
 Video files stored out to a CDN
 Over 1 Terrabyte video content

Content Relationship Engine (CRE)
 New user interface to support a large number
of categories
 700+ categories for advertising purposes

 Tagging support

 List functionality to search based on tags and
categories
 Developed prior to OpenCms 8

Solr Integration
 All OpenCms servers do not need to maintain
independent lucene query

 Added features for public facing search
 Faceting
 Stopwords
 Synonyms

Cloud Migration
 Project to upgrade from OpenCms 6 to
OpenCms 7 (later upgraded to OpenCms 8)

 Original plan was to migrate hardware from
physical to VMWare at our thrid party data
center

 2 months prior to completion the decision was
made to migrate to Amazon Web Services
(AWS)

Amazon Selection Factors
 Team familiarity with AWS

 Ease of beginning an engagement
 No contract

 Cost
 Limited payment options

 Large client base (Netflix, Instagram, …)

 Large selection of services beyond virtual
computing resources

OpenCms on AWS
 S3 / EC2 Admin Tools

 CloudWatch & Simple Notification Service

 Simple Email Service (SES)

 Relational Database Service (RDS)

 ElastiCache

S3 / EC2 Overview
 What is S3 (Simple Storage Service)
 File storage in the cloud
 Our uses:
 Backing up a SQL dump of our production
database
 Temporary storage of video content during
transcoding process
 Serving some static web content (CSS, JS, etc)

 What is EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)?
 Web service that provides resizable compute
capacity in the cloud. (ie. servers)

S3 / EC2 OpenCms Admin Tools
 S3 Admin Tools in OpenCms
 Allows for browsing the contents of all our S3
buckets from within OpenCms
 Can download content directly from admin tool

 EC2 Admin Tools in OpenCms
 Lists ALL servers in our environment including:
 Server status (running, stopped, etc)
 Public DNS entry
 Instance ID
 Security Group
 Link directly to Tomcat admin portal if server is
running it

CloudWatch &
Simple Notification Service (SNS)
 CloudWatch provides monitoring for
AWS cloud resources and applications.

 Default metrics for all EC2 Instances
 e.g. CPU, memory, disk IO
 1 minute measurement interval

 Tracking custom metrics
 OpenCms Publish Times, Java
Heap Usage, Database
Connections

 Alert Thresholds (SNS)
 Text message, email, JSON posts

Simple Email Service (SES)
 Managed service for bulk email sending

 CloudWatch Integration
 Monitor deliveries, bounces etc. from within AWS
console

 Multiple endpoints
 SMTP
 Web Service Calls

 Uses
 Currently send all website registration emails through
SES
 Goal is to replace Exact Target with SES for mass
emails (newsletters, etc) to reduce costs

Relational Database Service (RDS)
 Managed Relational Database (PaaS)
 MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL
 We use MySQL

 Change to traditional database administration
 No access to server console
 No access to a true SA account

 Active / Passive Failover Configuration

 Easy server upgrades

 Automatic backups

ElastiCache
 Managed Memcached Service
 Web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate,
and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.

 Integration of ElastiCache metrics with CloudWatch
 Hit rates, Eviction Rates etc.

 Similar to Alkacon OCEE Accelerator cache
 Memcached allows for one global cache copy as
opposed to one on each app server

 Reduces hits to our database servers, faster page loads ,
increases ability to handle high traffic volumes, and gets
us closer to goal of autoscaling.

The Future
• Automatic Horizontal Scaling

• CloudFront as a Content Delivery
Network (CDN)

• CloudSearch to replace Solr Search

Auto Scaling Issues
with Current
Architecture

Auto Scaling Issues with
Current Architecture (cont.)
 Why autoscale?
 Increased scalability and reliability
 Reduced costs

 Issues with AutoScaling OpenCms
 Sticky Sessions
 In the cloud sticky sessions are a bad thing
 Direct communication between web and
application servers
 Application server synchronization
 Direction communication across application
servers (Alkacon Cluster Module)

Automatic Horizontal Scaling -
Solutions
 Memcached session management with Tomcat

 Implement SQS (Simple Queue Service) for
communication between the workplace and the
application servers for application server synchronization

 Allow web and application tiers to expand / contract
independently of each other
 Load balance traffic between web and application layers

Automatic Horizontal
Scaling - Solution

CloudFront as a
Content Distribution Network (CDN)
 Currently use Limelight for video distribution

 Moving videos to CloudFront will be a big cost
savings

 Front static content from OpenCms to decrease
page load times
 Images, CSS, JavaScript

CloudSearch
 Fully managed search service (PaaS)

 API similar to Solr API
 Reduced features

 Replace our Solr implementation which
removes the need to manage a separate
server dedicated to search

 Improved Scalability / Autoscale

Questions?
David Landreman
Web Services IT Manager
Email: dlandreman@dispatch.com
Twitter: @GraphIt2000
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlandreman

Andrew Roth
Senior Internet Development Engineer
Email: aroth@dispatch.com
Twitter: @guitarplayinpro
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rothandrew

OpenCms Days 2012 - The Dispatch - Running OpenCms 8 on Amazon cloud services

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