Jahia Solutions, a DXP and CMS editor, is focusing on delivering on-premise and cloud-based headless CMS capabilities. Our goal is to make digital simpler for all stakeholders that are handling complex projects, whether they are doing development, system administration, marketing or communication. Based in Switzerland, France, UK, USA, Canada, Germany and Austria, we have more than 130 major clients like Ben&Jerry’s, Europcar, ISO, and Sodexo.
Core Aims of Jahia CMS
We help marketing teams take control of their digital presence by creating highly personalized websites that they can manage on a day-to-day basis. Our products are highly modular and customizable. They can be extended to connect to any third-party system, whether it is a SaaS product or a legacy system hosted on-premise.
To reach our goal of simplifying digital, we try to improve all aspects of a website creation. We redesigned all our UIs to provide neat interfaces for content contributors and marketing people. We provided headless APIs for developers and significantly reworked all our product line to make it natively compliant with cloud platforms. And of course, we worked on Jahia Cloud, powered by Jelastic, to provide a world-class CMS-as-a-Service offering, so that our clients can enjoy all our software without managing the infrastructure.
Moving to the Cloud and SaaSification
We studied all the usual implementations of Container-as-a-Service and automation platforms. We knew we needed to pick a platform with a global footprint that would allow us to be available worldwide.
Jelastic PaaS made it very easy for us to choose them. It is compliant with all big cloud infrastructure providers, such as AWS, Google and Azure. Jelastic platform integrates amazingly well with Java software and provides elegant solutions to manage environment provisioning, scaling, configuration, and backups. It is API-first by design, which was a key requirement, and fits very well in the DevOps world with automated CI/CD pipelines.
While migration, we had total liberty to choose Java version, garbage collector strategy, and the required JVM parameters. Jelastic provided all necessary capabilities to automatically install, upgrade and maintain our software stack.
We adapted to the container world’s best practices by building Docker images of our software and passing dynamic configurations as environment variables. Other than that, all our products fit nicely in the Jelastic model without any changes required.
Infrastructure High Availability
On the infrastructure level, we work with AWS and Azure, which are amazing partners. We chose them for their global footprint, performance, reliability, and solutions architect teams that help us make the best choices.
Jelastic supports multi-region deployment that we leverage using AWS and Azure Availability Zones. As Jahia delivers CMS and DXP capabilities for global organizations, many of our clients host hundreds of websites and need to have infrastructure spread around the world. Jahia Cloud is already available in AWS North Virginia (USA) and Ireland regions, as well as Azure Iowa (USA) region. This is just a beginning, and we plan to open more in the future (maybe even from other cloud and data center vendors). Jelastic brings cross-cloud regions together and allows effortless environment and site content copy across availability zones.
High availability on application level is achieved by making services redundant, including the database that leverages the integrated MariaDB auto-clustering configuration of Jelastic.
To ensure backups, we used Jelastic Cloud Scripting and developed a specific add-on that automatically triggers environment snapshots at a configurable frequency that is required by our system. Clients are also autonomous to trigger snapshots whenever they need it, like before performing a sensitive operation on the platform. Snapshots can be restored at any time in one click, which is really convenient. On top of the environment-by-environment backup, we use Jelastic native backup strategy that includes backing up the whole infrastructure cluster to cover the worst disaster cases.
In conclusion, we’d like to highlight that Jelastic support and engineering teams are reactive, very knowledgeable about their technology, and incredibly dedicated to their clients’ success. We are sure that our joint offering will help to reach the set goal and make digital simpler for the customers worldwide.
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About Author
Julian Maurel, Product Manager at Jahia who is in charge of managing the Cloud (PaaS and SaaS) products at Jahia, as well as the DevOps practices ranging from continuous integration to platform optimization, troubleshooting, and monitoring.
About Solution
Jahia transformed its own products to the SaaS offering with the help of Jelastic PaaS:
- the applications are used as is without any code changes or re-architecting
- platform API helped to automate CI/CD processes and connect to the existing systems (e.g. billing)
- personalized and easy-to-use customer experience
- privately installed on the chosen infrastructure regions that meet requirements
- focus on the business, as infrastructure is managed by the platform
Building or running software? We can help to transform your business to SaaS with minimum efforts and full white-labeling. Get in touch with Jelastic team.
