Rapid CQ deployments at your fingertips

Jakub Wadolowski

About me

• Systems Engineer @ Cognifide

• Open source and Linux enthusiast

• 3 years of experience with Adobe CQ

• Chef user for over a year

Configuration management problem (1)

• root@server:~# ls /etc/apache2/apache2*

• /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

• /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.OLD

• /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.BAK

• /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.20131201

• /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.orig.20130123

• …

Configuration management problem (2)

DEV STAGING PROD

System integrity

Solutions! (1)

• Manual configuration• Error-prone

• Time consuming

• Works until you have to deal with a several dozensof servers on a daily basis

Solutions! (2)

• Golden images• Quite heavy

• Hard to transfer between various autonomoussystems

• Hard to modify seamlessly

• Hidden (and most probably undocumented) configuration details

Solutions! (3)

• Configuration management• It’s all about the state of your servers/services

• Treat your infrastructure as code

• Define policy once, reuse everywhere

• Reduce complexity

• Reconstruct business from code repository, data backup and compute resources

Let’s cook something!

Chef core principles

• Idempotence

• Thick client, thin server

• Order matters

• Declarative

• Convergent

• Underlying technology agnostic

Chef overview

• Chef server

• Chef client

• Workstation

• Node

• Cookbook• Recipes• Templates• Attributes• Resources• …

CQ Unix Toolkit cookbook

• Installs specific version of CQ Unix Toolkit

• Provides underlying tools for CQ cookbook

CQ cookbook

• CQ installation

• Internals management (users, packages, etc.)

CQ deployments with Chef (1)

• Server provisioning• Users

• Sudo settings

• Common packages installation

• Ulimit

• SysVInit deamon

• Monitoring

• …

CQ deployments with Chef (2)

• CQ installation• Install proper Java version

• Download and unpack JAR file

• Tune JVM settings

• …

CQ deployments with Chef (3)

• CQ management• Create CQ users

• Configure replication agents

• Install CRX packages

• …

The power of Chef – JVM (1)

The power of Chef – JVM (2)

The power of Chef – JVM (3)

The power of Chef – CQ Users (1)

Demo time!

Why you should care?

• Never hear 'works on my machine' again

• Keep track of your CQ servers

• Ability to recreate your infrastructure from scratch anytime you need it

• Helps you scale horizontally

• Rapid package deployments

• Improved development workflow

Current status

• Only CQ 5.6.x is supported

• Full CQ installation

• CQ JVM tuning

• Run CQ as Linux daemon

• User management

• CRX package management

Roadmap

• CQ users improvements (groups support)

• New resources• cq_agent (replication & flush)

• cq_bundle (OSGi configuration)

• CQ 5.5 support

• More automated tests

• Public release within the next few weeks!

THANK YOU!