ColdFusion On The Cloud Amazon EC2 and S3 Presented by Denard Springle @ CFMeetup Dec 22nd, 2011

Over 20 years IT & development experience Sr. Software Developer @ CF Webtools Over 20 years IT & development experience Java, Perl, PHP, C/C++ Hardware, network and storage engineering CMMI process management & assessment Over 10 years ColdFusion experience (v4.5) Rich internet and mobile applications Host of the Northern Virginia CFUG denard.springle@gmail.com http://www.nvcfug.org/ @ddspringle

What is the ‘Cloud’? Typically defined as a suite of services working together to provide virtualization, scalability and variable performance to hosted operating systems and applications. Allows full control of your hosting environment from operating system to web server to database to network. Allows for private networking, load balancing, instant-on provisioning, instant-on backups and more! ‘Cloud’ is often misrepresented by companies as a name for their virtualization service. Virtualization != Cloud.

How to get Amazon Web Services Go to http://aws.amazon.com and click ‘Sign-Up Now’ Follow the processes to enter your information, email, etc. asked for by Amazon Provide payment information (you will not be billed until you use the service) AWS offers a Free Tier of service which provides one full year of hours to run an EC2 micro Amazon Linux instance, S3 storage and more for *new* clients only. If you already have an AWS account, you do not qualify. An EC2 micro Amazon Linux instance and ~10G S3 storage costs about $15/mo total as of Dec 2011.

Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2) Amazon’s computing platform, called EC2, provides nearly instant on Linux and Windows cloud servers of many different flavors and sizes Highly secure environment with 256-bit AES encryption, helps meet PCI compliance for managing financial or sensitive information Easily scale up or down, add or remove servers and load balancers, to handle higher traffic (e.g. Black Friday) EC2 servers run in their own memory space – unlike many other cloud providers who share memory between cloud servers.

Creating your first instance. Launch a new Amazon EC2 instance Specify the operating system you want to use (Amazon Linux 32-bit in this case) Specify the parameters of the cloud server to use Specify the private keys you want to use, or create them Specify the firewall settings you want to use, or create them (NOTE: You must open up the SSH port on Linux or the RDP port on Windows or you will not be able to access the server! You will also want to open HTTP/HTTPS ports.) Confirm your settings and launch the instance Demo this now 

Accessing EC2 from Windows Download Putty.exe and PuttyGen.exe from the Putty Download Page Download the security key you generated on Amazon Web Services – KEEP A COPY OF THIS KEY IN A SAFE PLACE! Use PuttyGen.exe to convert the key to putty format (NOTE: the putty format also works with the FileZilla FTP client) Launch Putty.exe and specify the key to use for the session or use a .bat file consisting of: X:\path\to\putty -i mykey.ppk ec2-user@myhostname|myip Copy and paste the connection information from Amazon Web Services (e.g. ec2-user@myhostname|myip) Login to the Amazon Linux EC2 server with Putty Demo this now 

Accessing EC2 from OSX/Linux Open a terminal Pass SSH the keyfile you downloaded from AWS: > ssh –i mykey.pem ec2-user@myhostname|myip Enjoy. NOTE: SCP also uses this same convention, for copying files to the server under OSX/Linux. > scp –i mykey.pem ec2-user@myhostname|myip …

Sudo – Super User Do AWS Linux (all variants) are configured to allow the ec2-user sudo access to everything except passwd root There is no ‘root’ user to log into. This is a safety measure that mitigates hacking and rootkit attempts Any time you want to make a change to the file system (including copying, moving, downloading, installing or removing files/applications, etc.) you will need to use sudo The only exception is within the ec2-user’s home directory, where you can perform any basic file system operations within that directory.

Yummy Yummy Yum Yum (Yellowdog Updater Modified) is the package manager associated with numerous Linux distro’s, including CentOS, upon which Amazon Linux is based. > sudo yum install <package to install> [ENTER] - installs packages from the repository > sudo yum update [ENTER] – updates all installed packages with available updates > yum list <wilcard search string> [ENTER] - lists installed and available packages Sudo not required to list packages (no system changes)

First Steps with Amazon Linux Amazon Linux comes as a fairly plain (locked down) server deployment, so, the first thing to do is ensure you’ve got the latest Apache build installed. Sudo is required. > sudo yum install httpd [ENTER] > sudo yum install httpd-devel [ENTER] > sudo yum install libstdc++.so.5 [ENTER] > sudo chkconfig httpd on [ENTER] httpd-devel and libstdc++.so.5 are required by the ColdFusion installer libstdc++.so.5 should always locate to the most recent libstdc++ available, if not, use: > yum find libstdc* to locate the correct package to install Demo this now 

Next steps – acquire ColdFusion Download ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion 9.0.1 update: NVCFUG S3 Hosted 32-Bit Linux ColdFusion 9.0.1 Quick Start Package (**For deployment in US-EAST Zone only**) Use wget (or similar utility) to download the gzip’d and tar’d quick start archive: > wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/nvcfug/dev/AWS.EC2.i386.cf901.QuickStart.tar.gz Unpack the archive with tar: > tar xvzf AWS.EC2.i386.cf901.QuickStart.tar.gz [ENTER] > cd cf901QuickStart [ENTER] Demo this now 

Install ColdFusion 9 > sudo ColdFusion_9_WWE_Linux.bin [ENTER] Hit [ENTER] a bunch to get through the license Enter ‘y’ to agree to the license Choose install type – developer, licensed or 30-day trial Enter serial number, if applicable (licensed) Choose ‘Server Configuration’ (other methods are supported, but we won’t cover those in this demo) Specify if there is already a CF9 server installed (no) Select or deselect components as needed Start demo now 

Install ColdFusion 9, cont… Choose the install folder. /opt/coldfusion9 is the default Specify if earlier versions of CF are installed (no) Add Web Server Configuration (option 1) Choose Apache (option 1) Specify location of the config file: /etc/httpd/conf Specify the location of the binary: /usr/sbin/httpd Specify the binary control file location: /etc/init.d/httpd

Install ColdFusion 9, cont… Continue with installation (option 4) Specify CF9 admin location (default /var/www/html) Specify runtime user (nobody) Skip OpenOffice configuration (unless needed) Enter and confirm the admin password Enable RDS and specify the RDS password Confirm installation Grab a beverage and wait, and wait, and wait Once complete, DO NOT start the server… yet!

Configuring ColdFusion & Apache CF *does not* properly update the apache_connector.sh file that get’s executed the first time ColdFusion starts when installing on Linux Replace the CF created shell file with the one downloaded in the cf901QuickStart > sudo cp –f apache_connector.sh /opt/coldfusion9/bin/connectors/ [ENTER] Else, sudo vi /opt/coldfusion9/bin/connectors/apache_connector.sh [ENTER] and manually change the paths for the conf, binary and init files.

Starting ColdFusion And start ColdFusion > sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion start [ENTER] Tail the cfserver.log file to watch CF start > tail -f /opt/coldfusion9/logs/cfserver.log [ENTER] Hit CTRL-C to stop tailing the file when it’s done loading Open the CF Administrator for the first time in a browser

Update to CF901 Stop Apache and ColdFusion > sudo /etc/init.d/httpd stop [ENTER] > sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion stop [ENTER] > sudo ColdFusion_update_901_WWEJ_linux.bin [ENTER] Runs exactly like the CF9 install, except all values will already be filled in. *Do not add another connector for Apache.* Grab a beverage and wait, and wait, and wait

Restart Apache & CF Restart Apache and ColdFusion > sudo /etc/init.d/httpd start [ENTER] > sudo /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion start [ENTER] Tail the cfserver.log file to watch CF start > tail -f /opt/coldfusion9/logs/cfserver.log [ENTER] Hit CTRL-C to stop tailing the file when ColdFusion is done loading

Configure CF to start on boot ‘coldfusion’ file is an init script, you only have to copy it to the init directory and configure the system to start it: > sudo cp /opt/coldfusion9/bin/coldfusion /etc/init.d/ [ENTER] > sudo chkconfig --add coldfusion [ENTER] That’s it. Your done. Grab a celebratory beverage!

Install MySQL (optional) > sudo yum install mysql [ENTER] > sudo yum install mysql-server [ENTER] > sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start [ENTER] Follow the instructions for adding a root user to MySQL shown on the console when MySQL starts the first time Use mysqladmin to manage the database(s) or install PHP & PHPMyAdmin for a web based interface Connect created database(s) through the ColdFusion administrator as normal

Simple Storage Service (S3) CF9.0.1 uses Apache VFS to facilitate access to Amazon S3 buckets You must use a script style Application.cfc to properly instantiate the S3 settings (caveat #1) DirectoryExists() always returns false when trying to access Amazon S3 buckets (caveat #2) DirectoryCreate() always works, even if there is already a bucket in existence (caveat #3) Directory and File functions include the bucket path in the filename (caveat #4)

Application.cfc with S3 in CF cfscript style CFC works CFML style CFC fails component { this.name="AmazonS3Demo"; //s3 info this.s3.accessKeyid = "<accessKey>"; this.s3.awsSecretKey = "<secretKey>"; } <cfcomponent> <cfscript> this.name = "AmazonS3Demo"; <!--- s3 info ---> this.s3.accessKeyId = "<accessKey>"; this.s3.awsSecretKey = "<secretKey>"; </cfscript> </cfcomponent> Alternative method of directly accessing S3 within code w/o initializing it in the Application.cfc: DirectoryCreate(“S3://<accessKey>:<secretKey>@bucket/path/”)

Using S3 within ColdFusion All file and directory tags and functions in CF work with Amazon S3 s3:// is the only difference between using these tags and functions to call a file on Amazon S3 and calling a local file (e.g. D:\, /var/www/) Filenames will contain the full path to the file excluding the bucket. (e.g. instead of ‘myfile.jpg’ you will get ‘path/to/myfile.jpg’ as the name column and ‘s3://bucket/’ as the directory column). As an aside, use ram:// in CF9.0.1 to use the local RAM drive with Apache VFS (configure VFS in CF Admin) Demo this now 

Additional Resources Jeff Roberson’s CF & EC2 blog post Willem Redelijkheid's blog post on installing CF on CentOS CFMeetup "Replace Your Iron with a Cloud", with Barney Boisvert Ray Camden’s Amazon S3 guide Adobe’s S3 LiveDocs NVCFUG S3 Demo Page Download this presentation at: css.dvdmenubacks.com

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