In v5.6.1, CQ offers the capability (beta, not GA yet) to host CQ’s Data Store in Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service) as a “feature pack” (FP). If interested in evaluating this feature, please contact your Adobe Account Manager or Technical Support contact. You need an additional package named something like cq-5.6.1-featurepack-3321.zip

This can then be shared across all of your “publish” instances, whether clustered or not. Combining this feature with Binary-Less Replication lets you share the S3-based Data Store among your “author” AND “publish” instances.

For large repositories in the Cloud, this will get you BIG savings on storage costs.

Amazon S3 is a web-scale object store that can be used as a hosting platform for Adobe CQ’s Data Store. S3 offers SLAs of 99.99% availability and 99.999999999% durability for data stored.

Our experience indicates that between 50-70% of the storage taken up by CQ’s repository is attributable to the Data Store.

See sample repository.xml and the associated aws.properties files.

On startup, the CQ error.log will contain a series of entries which look as follows:

*INFO* [FelixStartLevel] com.day.crx.cloud.s3.ds.CachingDataStore Uploaded {6724026}/{583201054}

Initial startup will be slow (7-10 minutes) as each Data Store object is uploaded to S3. A brand new CQ instance will create about 4,200 S3 objects of about 0.5 GB. See below:

Search the CQ error.log for entries containing “com.day.crx.cloud.s3.ds.CachingDataStore” for this feature.

If everything works, you will see the following in the error.log