On External session storage, Standard, Enterprise, and Containers

(Copied from the Prerelease forum as Adobe did not answer it there)

Hi Adobe folks,

I am in the process of working on a guide to CF containerization deployment from the perspective of somebody who has never worked with containers before. It is intended for an audience that is stuck in Ye Olde Days of running an installer on a Windows machine and not thinking too hard about what is happening (this is easy, because it described us pretty well until not that long ago).

I am making a concerted effort to be agnostic and provide examples and support for as many CF engines as I can. This is made difficult on the Adobe side by some licensing and standard v. enterprise considerations , some of which I know have come up and been addressed to some extent but others I'm not sure about.

At the moment, the draft version of our guide covers ACF11, 2016, and the forthcoming 2018 (standard and enterprise), along with Lucee 5+. I think it'd be best for all concerned if it stays that way -- the more versions of ACF I have to drop, the less effective the message will be, and the message is "CF can be just as modern as everybody else if you only believe!" But if it costs $8,000 to believe then that's probably an obstacle. Specifically:

• As best I can tell, Adobe has not yet provided any information about configuration management for ACF outside of the session on CAR files from the last CF Summit. I was there and took copious notes, but frankly it's not tenable. Nobody who has seen Commandbox and CFConfig is going to monkey around with CAR files. But that's OK since CFConfig works with all the versions of ACF we're trying to cover.

However, ACF running in CommandBox thinks it's a J2EE install and requires an enterprise license. I understand this has been addressed for 2018 and possibly ACF2016 (nice!) -- but will it be addressed in ACF11 as well?

• Running CF in a container is all well and good, but if you can't scale, you're losing a lot of the benefit, and at the moment Sticky Sessions and Session Replication are Enterprise-only features per the CF Buyer's guide.

I'm not insensitive to the problem here, which is that you all need a feature set for which you can convincingly charge a lot more money to your enterprise clients. I'm also sure you have discussed internally how to handle this problem. I'm here to lobby for making container-friendly features a standard feature -- not because we can't afford an Enterprise license for our shop, but because these specific features have low- or no-cost alternatives like JRedis/CFRedis that just require extra work from the developer to implement.

The assumption I hope we're all comfortable making is that containerized deployments are here to stay and anyone who wants to stick around this business is going to be using them. Given that, I suggest that Adobe should get out in front of this and slap their built-in support for Redis on all the CF versions they can -- it's a great way to embrace modernity and even one-up Lucee, which (AFIAK) doesn't have a quick-and-easy "your session now lives on Redis" setting unless you pay Ortus for their connector ... and that's still a lot cheaper than an Enterprise license.

(also, I realize you can store sessions in a DB in Lucee; can you do this in ACF too?)

At any rate, because I'm approaching this task from the point of view of somebody who doesn't know anything about anything, the less I have to parse differences between CF engines, the more accessible the guide will be, and (bonus) the more of a marketing point it will be for ACF2016 and ACF2018 if all it takes to use these new features is turning on your Redis server and adding a line to Application.cfc.

Otherwise, we'll just put a big caveat in that you can only kinda-sorta do sticky sessions in ACF Standard through something like NGINX and ip_hash. That's fine, it's not the end of the world. But it sure would be nice to see you guys take the lead and get as many people benefiting from some of these newer features as possible.

All the best,
Sam