Stage 8: Next Steps After Migration

Congratulations! If you have completed all of the previous stages in this section, then you have successfully migrated your on-premises Liferay DXP installation to Liferay Cloud!

Now that you have Liferay DXP running on Liferay Cloud, you are ready to begin taking advantage of its features, including automated backups, built-in continuous integration, automatic service logging, and built-in security features.

However, to take full advantage of Liferay Cloud’s capabilities, there are some additional steps you can perform while getting started:

• Set up teams to manage membership and permissions
• Set up Single Sign-On to streamline authentication
• Add custom domains to meet your needs
• Set Up a Disaster Recovery Environment
• Configure Your Services to behave the way that works best for you
• Optimize and tune application performance
• Get started developing on Liferay Cloud

Set Up Teams

As an Administrator in Liferay Cloud, you have control over inviting other members and managing their access to various areas of your project as needed. Invite your team members and then give them the appropriate team roles to ensure everyone has the level of access they need in your Liferay Cloud project.

See Environment Teams and Roles for more information.

Set Up SSO

With Single Sign-On, you can use your preferred identity provider to authenticate Users to Liferay in your Liferay Cloud instance. This can help your sign-on experience feel smoother and more integrated with the rest of your project.

Liferay Cloud supports Single Sign-On Identity Providers that are compliant with SAML 2.0. For more information, see Using SSO with Liferay Cloud.

Add Custom Domains

Ensure that your environment on Liferay Cloud hosts your own custom domains as needed. Liferay Cloud integrates with your custom domains, allowing you to define certified domains for each environment.

See Custom Domains for more information.

Set Up a Disaster Recovery Environment

By default, Liferay Cloud mitigates downtime from service outages by providing automatic disaster recovery within the same region. However, in the event of a disaster causing an outage in the area servicing your Liferay Cloud environments, you should also consider using a fall-back environment (or Disaster Recovery environment) to minimize downtime for Users on your production instance.

Configure a Disaster Recovery environment to maintain the most robust possible protection from unplanned downtime. Learn more about automatic and cross-region Disaster Recovery here.

Important

To set up a Disaster Recovery environment, you must have purchased a separate environment for it as part of your subscription.

Configure Your Services

In addition to the liferay service, your main Liferay Cloud environments all have a set of default services that you can configure individually. Each of these services has some configurations that you should configure early on:

• The backup service automatically creates backups at regular intervals (or when you trigger them manually) which you can restore to your environments at any time. You may want to begin by setting your preferred frequency and retention period for your backups.

• The search service provides an Elasticsearch implementation for your liferay service. You can deploy .yml configuration files in your search service’s configs/common/config/ folder to configure the Elasticsearch behavior. See the official Elasticsearch documentation for more information.

• The webserver service provides a gateway between your Liferay Cloud services and the rest of the internet. Depending on the performance and the types of requests your Liferay instances service, you may want to tweak the timeout or number of retries for requests to be handled as expected.

• The database service securely provides the database that you uploaded earlier in migration. You may want to configure your preferred database maintenance window to mitigate the impact of downtime for maintenance.

Optimize and Tune Application Performance

As you begin using Liferay in Liferay Cloud, familiarize yourself with the available tools for monitoring and tuning application performance:

• Alerts can notify you in real-time when your services are running into problems with resource limitations, when they have scaled the number of instances up or down, and when they are experiencing other problems. Configure your status alerts to fit your needs so that you are aware of these events.

• Auto-scaling automatically adjusts the number of instances of your Liferay service as needed to accommodate user traffic. Configure auto-scaling to take advantage of this optimization.

• View the service popover and Monitoring screen to view details about your services and their resource usage. See Application Metrics for more information about monitoring your services’ performance.

• For production environments, you can also use Dynatrace integration to use more advanced performance metrics. Note that this requires a specific Dynatrace add-on to your Liferay Cloud subscription to use.

You should perform your own performance testing and optimization with your instance on Liferay Cloud, the same way as you would tune an on-premises instance. The service data, metrics, and logging available are all there to help you with your testing.

Get Started Developing on Liferay Cloud

Now that you have migrated to Liferay Cloud and you have already deployed your customizations, you can continue your developments by deploying your changes to your Cloud environment(s). If you have not already, then getting familiar with the command-line tool can help you perform development tasks.

In addition to deploying your services via the Liferay Cloud console, you can also configure automatic deployments to speed up the process for your development environment. You can also customize the Jenkins pipeline that the CI service uses to suit your needs.

Learn more about the Liferay Cloud deployment workflow here.