Running Liferay DXP in Amazon Web Services

There are two ways to host Liferay DXP in AWS:

1. Installing Liferay DXP from AWS Marketplace.

2. Installing Liferay DXP using the “plain” Helm chart.

For more information, see Installing Liferay in AWS.

Once you’ve installed Liferay, you can set it up with portal properties, environment variables, and more. For more information, see Configuring Liferay in AWS.

Configuring Dependent Services

The Liferay DXP image by default uses three embedded services that must be reconfigured for production use:

1. A relational database (Hypersonic embedded database)

2. A search engine (Elastic Search embedded sidecar)

3. File storage (FileSystemStore using the container file system)

These default services are suitable for testing, but they should not be used in production. To configure the dependencies, you must use externally or internally managed services. See AWS Managed Resources Reference for a list of the default managed resources.

Managing Resources and Auto-Scaling

One of the advantages of running Liferay in a Kubernetes cluster is auto-scaling. If you dedicate too few resources to your installation, performance drops, and users may find it slow and hard to use. If you dedicate too many, your installation might incur unnecessarily high costs and maintenance. With auto-scaling, you can strike a balance by choosing to allocate more resources only when there is sufficient demand.

Before you can enable auto-scaling, you must install an APM tool. These tools extract metrics from your cluster for you to view. This way, you can manage your resources and get insight into how well your system meets the current demands. For more information, see Viewing Metrics from Kubernetes

Once you have an APM tool installed, you can use the gathered metrics to scale the cluster automatically. For more information, see Auto-Scaling in AWS.