The Dispatch Printing Company is a leading regional media company in the USA, anchored by its flagship newspaper The Columbus Dispatch. Its Dispatch Broadcast Group owns and operates two TV stations, the WBNS radio station, the Ohio News Network radio service, and a 24-hour cable news channel. This session is a case study in migrating OpenCms sites, generating millions of daily page views, from a traditional data center to the Amazon Web Services platform. Through this migration there were many lessons learned about how to successfully use Amazon's cloud service offerings to improve OpenCms scalability and lower total costs to the business. An overview of select Amazon services and how they have been leveraged in a production OpenCms environment will be presented. We will talk about possible uses for a variety of Amazon services including: EC2 - Implementation strategy for running OpenCms on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud virtual hardware CloudWatch - Provide detailed visibility into the health of an OpenCms environment Simple Storage System - Work with OpenCms's export functionality to push exported files directly to Amazon's web accessible storage space CloudFront - Leverage the power of a content delivery network for your OpenCms environment We will discuss the effort prior to launch to convince the business that Amazon would be reliable, allow for a disaster recovery plan, be secure, and save the business money. We will provide tips on how we setup our infrastructure to alleviate the various concerns the business had. The first service leveraged was Amazon CloudWatch. This service can provide a detailed look at the health of the entire OpenCms infrastructure with little to no custom development effort. This includes the ability to quickly create alerts and notifications for when anything goes wrong in your environment. We also decided to leverage Amazon Relational Data Services. We will present the trade-offs in the decision to use a managed data layer and how we justified taking the managed database approach. Finally, we will briefly cover the other Amazon services that have been used as a part of our OpenCms deployment including ElastiCache, CloudFront, Simple Queue Service, Simple Email Service, SimpleDB, and Amazon S3.

1. OpenCms:
Amazon Web
Services (AWS)

2. The Presenters
David Landreman
Web Services IT Manager
Email: dlandreman@dispatch.com
Twitter: @GraphIt2000
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlandreman
Andrew Roth
Senior Internet Development Engineer
Email: aroth@dispatch.com
Twitter: @guitarplayinpro
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rothandrew

3.  Newspapers, weekly periodicals, TV stations, and radio
stations in Columbus, Ohio, USA
 23 websites hosted on Amazon in OpenCMS 8
 http://www.dispatch.com
 http://www.10tv.com
 Millions of pageviews daily
 5 Years of content
 700,000 HTML files
 1.5 Million Resources (images, video metadata, etc.)
 NginX Web Tier (4 Servers)
 Tomcat 7 App Tier (4 Servers)

4. OpenCms Customizations
 Over 40 custom modules developed
 Advanced RSS Feeds
 Video Support
 XML Content Editor Changes
 Content Relationship Engine (CRE)
 Custom User Administration Tools
 Solr Search Integration
 Workplace UI Enhancements
 Advanced Properties Dialog
 Shortcuts Bar

5. Custom RSS Feed Module
 More than content management for websites
 Amazon Kindle
 Native iPhone / Android Apps
 Facebook Pages
 Support for value lookup in nested resources
 E.g. Story Resource includes VFS path to Author
and the RSS should include author’s twitter
handle
 Filtering by content type
 Easily Extendable
 Media RSS for Video feeds
 GeoRSS

6. Video Support
 Video management completely inside
OpenCms for content editors
 Admin tools
 Uploading new videos
 Viewing transcode status
 Integration with RSS module for MRSS feeds
 Automatic video thumbnail generation
 Thumbnail added to VFS
 Only video metadata is stored in OpenCms
 Video files stored out to a CDN
 Over 1 Terrabyte video content

7. Content Relationship Engine (CRE)
 New user interface to support a large number
of categories
 700+ categories for advertising purposes
 Tagging support
 List functionality to search based on tags and
categories
 Developed prior to OpenCms 8

8. Solr Integration
 All OpenCms servers do not need to maintain
independent lucene query
 Added features for public facing search
 Faceting
 Stopwords
 Synonyms

9. Demo

10. Cloud Migration
 Project to upgrade from OpenCms 6 to
OpenCms 7 (later upgraded to OpenCms 8)
 Original plan was to migrate hardware from
physical to VMWare at our thrid party data
center
 2 months prior to completion the decision was
made to migrate to Amazon Web Services
(AWS)

11. Amazon Selection Factors
 Team familiarity with AWS
 Ease of beginning an engagement
 No contract
 Cost
 Limited payment options
 Large client base (Netflix, Instagram, …)
 Large selection of services beyond virtual
computing resources

12. OpenCms on AWS
 S3 / EC2 Admin Tools
 CloudWatch & Simple Notification Service
 Simple Email Service (SES)
 Relational Database Service (RDS)
 ElastiCache

13. S3 / EC2 Overview
 What is S3 (Simple Storage Service)
 File storage in the cloud
 Our uses:
 Backing up a SQL dump of our production
database
 Temporary storage of video content during
transcoding process
 Serving some static web content (CSS, JS, etc)
 What is EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud)?
 Web service that provides resizable compute
capacity in the cloud. (ie. servers)

14. S3 / EC2 OpenCms Admin Tools
 S3 Admin Tools in OpenCms
 Allows for browsing the contents of all our S3
buckets from within OpenCms
 Can download content directly from admin tool
 EC2 Admin Tools in OpenCms
 Lists ALL servers in our environment including:
 Server status (running, stopped, etc)
 Public DNS entry
 Instance ID
 Security Group
 Link directly to Tomcat admin portal if server is
running it

15. CloudWatch &
Simple Notification Service (SNS)
 CloudWatch provides monitoring for
AWS cloud resources and applications.
 Default metrics for all EC2 Instances
 e.g. CPU, memory, disk IO
 1 minute measurement interval
 Tracking custom metrics
 OpenCms Publish Times, Java
Heap Usage, Database
Connections
 Alert Thresholds (SNS)
 Text message, email, JSON posts

16. Simple Email Service (SES)
 Managed service for bulk email sending
 CloudWatch Integration
 Monitor deliveries, bounces etc. from within AWS
console
 Multiple endpoints
 SMTP
 Web Service Calls
 Uses
 Currently send all website registration emails through
SES
 Goal is to replace Exact Target with SES for mass
emails (newsletters, etc) to reduce costs

17. Relational Database Service (RDS)
 Managed Relational Database (PaaS)
 MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL
 We use MySQL
 Change to traditional database administration
 No access to server console
 No access to a true SA account
 Active / Passive Failover Configuration
 Easy server upgrades
 Automatic backups

18. ElastiCache
 Managed Memcached Service
 Web service that makes it easy to deploy, operate,
and scale an in-memory cache in the cloud.
 Integration of ElastiCache metrics with CloudWatch
 Hit rates, Eviction Rates etc.
 Similar to Alkacon OCEE Accelerator cache
 Memcached allows for one global cache copy as
opposed to one on each app server
 Reduces hits to our database servers, faster page loads ,
increases ability to handle high traffic volumes, and gets
us closer to goal of autoscaling.

19. Demo

20. The Future
• Automatic Horizontal Scaling
• CloudFront as a Content Delivery
Network (CDN)
• CloudSearch to replace Solr Search

21. Auto Scaling Issues
with Current
Architecture

22. Auto Scaling Issues with
Current Architecture (cont.)
 Why autoscale?
 Increased scalability and reliability
 Reduced costs
 Issues with AutoScaling OpenCms
 Sticky Sessions
 In the cloud sticky sessions are a bad thing
 Direct communication between web and
application servers
 Application server synchronization
 Direction communication across application
servers (Alkacon Cluster Module)

23. Automatic Horizontal Scaling -
Solutions
 Memcached session management with Tomcat
 Implement SQS (Simple Queue Service) for
communication between the workplace and the
application servers for application server synchronization
 Allow web and application tiers to expand / contract
independently of each other
 Load balance traffic between web and application layers

24. Automatic Horizontal
Scaling - Solution

25. CloudFront as a
Content Distribution Network (CDN)
 Currently use Limelight for video distribution
 Moving videos to CloudFront will be a big cost
savings
 Front static content from OpenCms to decrease
page load times
 Images, CSS, JavaScript

26. CloudSearch
 Fully managed search service (PaaS)
 API similar to Solr API
 Reduced features
 Replace our Solr implementation which
removes the need to manage a separate
server dedicated to search
 Improved Scalability / Autoscale

27. Questions?
David Landreman
Web Services IT Manager
Email: dlandreman@dispatch.com
Twitter: @GraphIt2000
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/davidlandreman
Andrew Roth
Senior Internet Development Engineer
Email: aroth@dispatch.com
Twitter: @guitarplayinpro
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/rothandrew