Running ColdFusion on AWS
Tens of thousands of websites use Adobe ColdFusion (ACF) to deliver applications and dynamic content. ColdFusion is widely used among midize and large automotive businesses, hospital & heathcare companies, financial services and government agencies. This rapid web-application development platform gained a strong foothold in the 90s with small businesses looking for a better option than Microsoft’s ASP (CF was originally only available for Windows servers). Using a Java-based application server, ColdFusion has been extended to run on other operating systems. Over twenty years later, Adobe ColdFusion remains alive and well, still delivering data and services from data centers and cloud environments around the world. Hosting ColdFusion on AWS is a powerful option.
When building & deploying web applications, one of the biggest challenges is maintaining performance. Slowdowns and crashes can disrupt your business and impact your revenue. Usage spikes, memory leaks, poor database performance, slow networks and application server issues can all give you migraines. When running ColdFusion on AWS, you can mitigate many issues to deliver a better customer experience.
Uptime
One of the most important design tasks when hosting mission-critical applications is to eliminate Single Point of Failure (SPoF) architectures. Put simply, you don’t want failure of one resource to result in the failure of your application. With ColdFusion, that typically requires building multiple levels of redundancy into your cloud architecture. Proper ACF licensing (e.g., Enterprise) enables creating multiple instances and clusters to facilitate a high-availability environment. Redundancy helps overcome problems like out-of-memory issues, application server hang-ups and network latency. Note, you can do the same with Lucee on AWS. The end result is improved uptime for ColdFusion (and databases too).
Performance
“We’re going to need a bigger boat!” Yes, sometimes you need to throw more computing power at your ColdFusion application to maximize performance. Perhaps you underestimated the capacity requirements when you started, or more likely, your needs have grown. With AWS, it can be as simple as adding more CPUs or memory. To do this, you resize your EC2 instance by choosing an instance type that meets your CPU, RAM, and feature requirements. With better performance, customers have a better experience.
Scalability
Regardless of how much CPU or memory your server has, there’s a physical limitation to the number of requests it can handle. Load balancers allow you to spread workload among multiple servers. So not only does a cloud configuration with load balancing provide better uptime and performance, it enables quickly adding capacity. In addition, you can utilize AWS Auto Scaling, which monitors your applications and automatically adjusts capacity to maintain steady, predictable performance at the lowest possible cost. Using AWS Auto Scaling, it’s easy to setup application scaling for multiple resources across multiple services in minutes. A scalable ColdFusion platform is essential for the long-term view of your business.
ColdFusion on AWS Rocks
Uptime, performance and scalability are critical to delivering a good customer experience. Over the long term, a growing application audience will undoubtedly tax infrastructure. For companies committed to applications built on Adobe ColdFusion or Lucee, you can obtain big advantages in these areas by leaving traditional data centers and migrating ColdFusion to the cloud. Over the past few years, we’ve seen firsthand how running ColdFusion on AWS rocks…
Leave A Comment