CF10 Production Best Practices

Question

Is there a document or additional information on the best way to configure multiple instances of CF10 in a production environment? Do most folks install CF10 as a ear/war J2EE deployment under JBoss or Tomcat with Apache as the webserver?

Answer 1

There’s no such document that I know of, no.
And here’s a perfect example where “best practices” is such a loaded phrase.
You wonder if “install CF10 as a ear/war J2EE deployment under JBoss or Tomcat with Apache as the webserver”. I’d say the answer to that is “absolutely not”. Most folks do NOT deploy CF as a JEE ear/war. It’s an option, yes. And if you are running A JEE server already, then it does make great sense to deploy CF as an ear/war on said container.
But would it be a recommended practice for someone installing CF10 without interest in JEE deployment? I’d say not likely, unless they already have familiarity with JEE deployment.
Now, could one argue “but there are benefits to deploying CF on a JEE container”? Sure, they could. But would it be a “best practice”? Only in the minds of a small minority I think (those who appreciate the beenfits of native JEE deployment and containers). Of course, CF already deploys on a JEE container (Tomcat in CF10, JRun in CF 6-9), but the Standard and Enterprise Server forms of deployment hide all that detail, which is best for most. With those, we just have a ColdFusion directory and are generally none-the-wiser that it runs on JRun or Tomcat.
That leads then to the crux of your first sentence: you mention multiple instances. That does change things quite a bit.
First, a couple point of clarification before proceeding: in CF 7-9, such “multiple instance” deployment was for most folks enabled using the Enterprise Multiserver form of deployment, and created a Jrun4 directory where instances were installed (as distinguished from the Enterprise Server form I just mentioned above, which hid the JRun guts).
In CF10, though, there is no longer a “multiserver” install option. It’s just that CF10 Enterprise (or Trial or Developer editions) does let you create new instances, using the same Instance Manager in the CF admin that existed for CF Enterprise Multiserver from 7-9. CF10 still only lets you create with the Enterprise (or trial or developer) edition, not Standard.
(There is a change in CF10 about multiple instances, though: note that in CF10, you never see a Tomcat directory, even if you want “multiple instances”. When you create them, they are created right under the CF10 directory, as siblings to the cfusion directory (and while that cfusion directory previously existed only in the CF 7-9 multiserver form of deployment, it does not exist even in CF10 Standard, as the only instance it can use.)
So all that is a lot of info, not any “best practices”, but you asked if there was any “additional info”, and I thought that helpful for you to have as you contemplate your options. (And of course, CF10 Enterprise does still let you deploy as a JEE ear/war if you want.)
But no, doing it would not be a best practices. If someone asked for “the best way to configure multiple instances of CF10 in a production environment”, I’d tell them to just proceed as they would have in CF 7-9, using the same CF Admin Instance Manager capability to create them (and optionally cluster them).
All that said, everything about CF10 does now run on Tomcat instead of JRun, and some things are improved under the covers, like clustering (and related things, like session replication), because those are now Tomcat-based features (which are actively updated and used by the Tomcat community), rather than JRun-based (which were pretty old and hardly used by anyone since JRun was EOL-ed several years ago).
I’ll note that I offer a talk with a lot more detail contrasting CF10 on Tomcat to CF9 and earlier on JRun. That may interest you, snormo, so check out the presentations page at carehart.org.
Hope all that’s helpful.
/charlie
PS You conclude with a mention of Apache as the web server. And sure, if one is on a *nix depoyiment or just favors Apache, it’s a fine option. But someone running CF 10 on Windows should not be discouraged from running on IIS. It’s come a long way and is now very secure, flexible, and capable, whether used for one or multiple instances of CF.