Liferay Deployment Options

The Liferay DXP platform is available in three different deployment approaches: Liferay SaaS, Liferay PaaS, and Liferay Self-Hosted. This is one of the first important decisions Clarity needs to make as they start planning to build enterprise websites with Liferay.

At a high level:

• Liferay Self-Hosted - Have full control and ownership of all aspects of deployment and maintenance of Liferay.
• Liferay PaaS - Have Liferay manage your cloud infrastructure while keeping control over your database, file storage, backups, etc.
• Liferay SaaS - All installation, maintenance, backups, upgrades, etc. are handled by Liferay.

Let’s go into these distinctions in further detail.

Liferay Self-Hosted

With the self-hosted approach, Liferay provides just the Liferay DXP software. It is up to the customer to manage everything else:

• Hardware and infrastructure: referring to the actual servers that the software is hosted on
• Platform-related software and configuration: setup and configuration of a database, search engine, and more
• Architecture: design and configuration of architecture for scaling, load balancing, backups, and failover situations
• Preparation, management, and deployment of updates, patches, and security hotfixes for the entire stack
• and of course…
• Solution Development: the actual building of the enterprise Site that the Clarity company wants to build

The biggest positive to this approach is that you have full control of your Liferay DXP deployment and you have every tool available to you for development and customization. Of course, this can also lead to future challenges when it comes to maintaining upgrades with these customizations. If this is a deployment approach that you’re interested in, there is a wealth of documentation and tutorials available for you to follow in order to correctly stand up a Liferay Self-Hosted deployments. See the documentation to learn more:

• Installation and Upgrades
• Installing and Upgrading a Search Engine
• Clustering for High Availability
• Maintaining a Liferay Installation

With that said, all of this work might be more than what Clarity Vision Solutions wants to take on at this stage of their business. Let’s move on to evaluate Liferay PaaS next.

Liferay PaaS

While Liferay Self-Hosted requires Clarity to fully manage their own infrastructure, Liferay PaaS provides cloud-based infrastructure and platform services to simplify the management and scalability of Liferay DXP. This includes:

• Web Server
• Backups
• Search Engine
• Database
• DevOps CI/CD Pipeline

Furthermore, with Liferay PaaS, Liferay’s cloud infrastructure includes features like, autoscaling, auto-failover, and load balancing. Configuration and monitoring is done through the Liferay Cloud Console and a connected GitHub repository using a configuration-as-code approach. Liferay PaaS also supports a variety of approaches for customization and development, but these approaches also carry the same upgrade-related risks that were mentioned before with Liferay Self-Hosted.

Learn more about the Liferay PaaS and working with its cloud infrastructure tools in the Liferay Cloud documentation.

While Liferay PaaS takes care of the cloud infrastructure and core platform updates, you’ll still need to handle Liferay DXP upgrades, patch implementation, and security hotfix application. All of this maintenance and management can still represent a hefty overhead that Clarity is not interested in.

Finally, let’s evaluate Liferay SaaS.

Liferay SaaS

With Liferay SaaS, the cloud infrastructure and Liferay DXP application is deployed and managed for you. This is the fastest way to get started building solutions with Liferay. Clarity will never have to worry about about whether their site is up and running. Instead they can immediately begin working with Liferay’s out-of-the-box features.

With this deployment approach Liferay provides:

• Product support
• Application Uptime SLA
• Platform Software
• Cloud Architecture and Infrastructure
• Upgrades
• Regular Updates
• Patches and Security hotfixes

Liferay takes care of the full tech stack including the web server running Liferay, the database, search, and file storage. Each Liferay SaaS account comes with a production (PRD) Liferay environment as well as a test (UAT) Liferay environment.

Client extension environments are also provided for custom development and customizations. Custom development is done through the use of Liferay Workspace and Client Extensions, both topics that are covered briefly in Module 2 - Developer Setup and later applied in Module 10 - Building Applications. A VPN client is also available in these extension environments to enable client extensions to integrate to systems within your own data center.

With Liferay SaaS, backups and upgrades are fully managed and done for you. There is no need to update your environment or patch previous releases. You can rest assured that your Liferay application is always up-to-date with the latest releases.

With a tight deadline and a strong desire to manage costs, Clarity Vision Solutions has decided that Liferay SaaS is the deployment approach for them. Next we will step through the Liferay SaaS onboarding process.

Up Next: Liferay SaaS Onboarding