Catch up on LDSF Frankfurt 2018

At the Liferay Digital Solutions Forum 2018 (#LDSF18) it is Liferay’s CEO Bryan Cheung who kicks off with an overview of the current state of Liferay and its future. Bryan explains that Liferay is rapidly adopting new technologies and hence is becoming a front leader in the corporate Digital eXperience market. Bryan highlights the release of DXP Cloud and expresses his understanding that this US-based solution is not so attractive for the European (and especially the German) customers because of GDPR-regulations. However, Bryan mentions that he is happy to talk about alternatives. We assume he was referring to Firelay’s Liferay OpenShift Services.

At LDSF DACH Firelay presented Liferay OpenShift Services: the most powerful, flexible and safe hosting and management solution for Liferay DXP. Liferay OpenShift Cloud is available in EU data centres in DE, UK, NL and FR. Liferay OpenShift Managed is available for on-premise installations. All our Liferay OpenShift Services are equipped with templates that let our customers easily install Liferay environments by the click of a mouse. Plus we extended OpenShift with Liferay specific development, deployment and management tools. As we already had identified the need of regulatory compliant hosting solutions for ‘DACH’-located companies, we had decided to hire our own booth at the LDSF18 to show and demonstrate our offering in more depth.

Although located at a different level than the main room, we had quite a few people visit our booth during the conference. From the conversations we had with visitors it became clear that a lot of companies struggle with:

• spinning up (temporary) test- and acceptance environments that are identical to the production environment quickly (‘…it takes our IT-department at least 4 days to provision a new environment…’);
• making use of the power of Docker as recognized by the developers in the organisation and production environments (‘… our developers have been working with Docker for 2 years now, but our production environment still runs on VMs…’);
• reliably executing deployments without downtime, and rollback (‘… when we deploy the application is down for a couple of hours…’)
• applying patches and updates automatically (‘.. I have to patch all clusters every Tuesday manually and that takes up a lot of my time…’);
• running Liferay reliably on OpenShift (‘… our IT-department has adopted OpenShift and we have Liferay, we just don’t know how to run our Liferay portal on OpenShift…’).

Exactly those are the things that can easily be overcome by using our Liferay on OpenShift solutions. 

During the lunch break our sales team demonstrated the installation of Liferay portal, hot-deploy into a running Liferay instance for rapid development and full environment build and deployment for production sites. It was demonstrated multiple times and every time people were amazed by the possibilities and ease of working and the speed. Actually, I think they were even more amazed that it was salespeople that demonstrated this (no deep-technical Liferay SysAdmin knowledge is required any longer to safely create and manage Liferay environments).

If you missed our demo at LDSF, you may be interested to know that we also offer private demo’s, feel free to contact us.