Overview

Adobe® CQ Cloud Manager is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that enables reduced time and costs for provisioning, managing, and metering Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions supporting digital marketing initiatives. Cloud Manager takes advantage of cloud computing technology, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Rackspace® Cloud Hosting, to start up CQ clusters quickly and consistently.

Using CQ Cloud Manager, Digital Marketing organizations can provision and deploy instances of their Web environment without having to procure hardware or pay large upfront costs. This ease of provisioning allows enterprises to rapidly engage customers, drive market shares, and focus on innovation.

A CQ cloud is a dedicated environment configured as a Web Experience Management (WEM) platform. You can deploy WEM applications and services on CQ clouds to support your organization's digital marketing initiatives. CQ clouds are provisioned and configured using the supported cloud provider of your choice.

You can create, access, manage, and monitor CQ clouds using Cloud Manager. Cloud Manager also lets you create automatic backups for any of your CQ clouds and restore those backups on demand.

The following infographic shows the Cloud Manager framework:

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New CQ clouds are created with a default three-tier architecture comprising an Author instance, a Publish instance, and a Dispatcher.

Default architecture of a CQ cloud (Click here to view a larger version of the infographic)

You can also add additional Publish instances and Dispatchers. The additional instances are set up in a farm topology.

A CQ cloud is provisioned on public clouds with one Dispatcher, one Publish instance, and one Author instance by default.

The following infographic illustrates how a CQ cloud is provisioned on the Amazon EC2 public cloud:

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Dispatcher: Amazon EC2 instance launched from an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) with no additional storage attached. Since the Dispatcher is used for load balancing across Publish instances and for caching static content, it utilizes only the instance ephemeral store.

Publish instance: Amazon EC2 instance launched from an AMI with Elastic Block Store (EBS) storage attached. Adobe CQ is installed on the persistent EBS storage in the /mnt/crx folder. The instance ephemeral store is not used in the current implementation.

Author instances: Amazon EC2 instance launched from an AMI with EBS storage attached. Adobe CQ is installed on the persistent EBS storage in the /mnt/crx folder. The instance ephemeral store is not used in the current implementation.

Backups: Backups are triggered using the CQ backup feature and then copied automatically to the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using your Amazon credentials.

Topologies: Cloud Manager supports two topologies for different hosting requirements:

Development/Testing: 1 Author instance, 1 Publish instance, and 1 Dispatcher with no load balancer

Staging/Production: 1 Author instance, 1 Publish instance, 1 Dispatcher, and a load balancer in front of the Dispatcher. You can scale to add a Dispatcher tier in addition to the default Dispatcher.

A CQ cloud is provisioned on Rackspace Cloud Hosting as follows:

Dispatcher: Rackspace cloud server launched from a Rackspace Server Image with persistent attached storage

Publish instance: Rackspace cloud server launched from a Rackspace Server Image with persistent attached storage. Adobe CQ is installed on the persistent storage in the /mnt/crx folder.

Author instances: Rackspace cloud server launched from a Rackspace Server Image with persistent attached storage. Adobe CQ is installed on the persistent storage in the /mnt/crx folder.

Backups: Backups are triggered using the CQ backup feature and then copied automatically to Cloud Files using your Rackspace credentials.