1. Rapid CQ deployments at
your fingertips
Jakub Wadolowski

2. About me
• Systems Engineer @ Cognifide
• Open source and Linux enthusiast
• 3 years of experience with Adobe CQ
• Chef user for over a year

3. 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
• …

4. Configuration management problem (2)
DEV STAGING PROD

5. System integrity

6. Solutions! (1)
• Manual configuration
• Error-prone
• Time consuming
• Works until you have to deal with a several dozens
of servers on a daily basis

7. Solutions! (2)
• Golden images
• Quite heavy
• Hard to transfer between various autonomous
systems
• Hard to modify seamlessly
• Hidden (and most probably undocumented)
configuration details

8. 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

9. Let’s cook something!

10. Chef core principles
• Idempotence
• Thick client, thin server
• Order matters
• Declarative
• Convergent
• Underlying technology agnostic

11. Chef overview
• Chef server
• Chef client
• Workstation
• Node
• Cookbook
• Recipes
• Templates
• Attributes
• Resources
• …

12. CQ Unix Toolkit cookbook
• Installs specific version of CQ Unix Toolkit
• Provides underlying tools for CQ cookbook

13. CQ cookbook
• CQ installation
• Internals management (users, packages, etc.)

14. CQ deployments with Chef (1)
• Server provisioning
• Users
• Sudo settings
• Common packages installation
• Ulimit
• SysVInit deamon
• Monitoring
• …

15. CQ deployments with Chef (2)
• CQ installation
• Install proper Java version
• Download and unpack JAR file
• Tune JVM settings
• …

16. CQ deployments with Chef (3)
• CQ management
• Create CQ users
• Configure replication agents
• Install CRX packages
• …

17. The power of Chef – JVM (1)

18. The power of Chef – JVM (2)

19. The power of Chef – JVM (3)

20. The power of Chef – CQ Users (1)

21. Demo time!

22. 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

23. 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

24. 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!

25. THANK YOU!