Cloud Native Experience

Important

This documentation reflects the Cloud Native Experience (CNE) as of Liferay DXP 2026.Q1. Use the latest version of the boilerplate repository before starting your deployment.

Liferay’s Cloud Native Experience (CNE) is a set of automation tools and blueprints for running Liferay DXP on your own cloud infrastructure. The CNE Operating Kit targets teams that run Liferay on their own cloud accounts (such as AWS, AZURE, or GCP) and want a standardized, automated approach aligned with Liferay’s own operational standards.

Depending on your requirements for portability versus automation, the toolkit is available in two versions: Kubernetes Ready and Cloud Provider Ready.

Key Benefits

The Cloud Native Operating Kit follows DevOps best practices to solve common operational challenges:

• GitOps-Driven Releases: Drive all infrastructure and application changes through your Git repository for versioned, traceable, and repeatable deployments.

• Automated Resilience: Use Horizontal Pod Auto-scaling (HPA) to adjust capacity based on traffic and rely on self-healing Kubernetes clusters to automatically replace unresponsive pods.

• Unified Observability: Access product-aware metrics and dashboards to track system health and resource consumption using standard industry tools like Grafana.

• Risk-Free Upgrades: Leverage automated pre-checks and zero-downtime deployment patterns to apply patches and DXP updates without service interruption.

• Cloud-Native Integration: Offload the burden of maintaining hardware by natively integrating with managed services like RDS, S3, and OpenSearch.

Deployment Models and Responsibilities

Choosing between a standard Self-Hosted setup and the Cloud Native Experience depends on how much of the platform operations your team intends to manage manually.

Platform Operation	Self-Hosted	CNE Kubernetes Ready	CNE Cloud Provider Ready
Provisioning Automation	Manual	Additional Subscription	Included
Container Orchestration	Manual	Included	Included
Networking Setup	Manual	Manual	Automated
Managed Services Config	Manual	Limited/Manual	Full Integration
Auto Scaling Strategy	Manual	Included	Included
Backup & Restore	Manual	Manual	Automated
Security by Design	Manual	Included	Included

Choosing Your Toolkit Version

The primary difference between toolkit versions is the level of automation provided for infrastructure and long-term maintenance. Traditional self-hosted upgrades are manual and high-risk; CNE automates this “heavy lifting,” including database schema and search index updates, to enable safer, zero-downtime deployments.

Kubernetes Ready

This is a universal version of the toolkit that works on any CNCF-certified Kubernetes cluster. While it provides core application blueprints, your team is responsible for manually connecting Liferay to external services like databases and storage.

• Best for: Multi-cloud strategies or private data centers.
• Manual Effort: Moderate (roughly half the effort of manual self-hosting).

Cloud Provider Ready

These vendor-specific versions (e.g., AWS Ready) include opinionated Terraform scripts to automate your entire foundation. They automatically link Liferay to managed services like Amazon RDS and S3 on Day 0.

• Best for: Teams looking to minimize overhead and reach production quickly.
• Manual Effort: Minimal (roughly 1/5 the effort of manual self-hosting).

Core Components

The toolkit combines three technologies to manage infrastructure and application life cycle:

Infrastructure Blueprints (Terraform)

Infrastructure code written with Terraform defines your cloud foundation. These blueprints provision Kubernetes clusters, networking, and supporting services in your cloud provider.

Application Blueprints (Helm Charts)

Application configuration packaged as Helm charts defines how Liferay runs inside Kubernetes. These charts configure memory, replicas, database connections, and health checks.

Visual Management Dashboard (Argo CD)

The toolkit installs Argo CD to manage deployments using GitOps principles. The dashboard provides a real-time view of your environments and synchronizes changes directly from your Git repository.

Next Steps

Check the CNE: Getting Started guide to ensure your local machine and cloud accounts are properly configured for deployment.