Liferay PaaS Experience
Liferay PaaS Experience is Liferay’s managed cloud-native platform for deploying and operating Liferay DXP environments. Unlike Liferay PaaS, which centers around the Liferay Cloud Console and customer-managed build pipelines, Liferay PaaS Experience uses a GitOps-driven architecture built on Kubernetes-native tooling, with Argo CD as the primary operational interface. Liferay manages the underlying cloud infrastructure and platform components while you manage your environments through GitOps repositories and platform tooling.
How Liferay PaaS Experience Differs from Liferay PaaS
Liferay PaaS Experience introduces a different operational model from Liferay PaaS.
| Area | Liferay PaaS | Liferay PaaS Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Primary management interface | Liferay Cloud Console | Argo CD, Argo Workflows, Grafana, and GCP Cloud Logging |
| Deployment model | Customer-specific Liferay container builds | Standardized Liferay runtime containers with overlays |
| Build and deployment workflow | Separate build and deployment processes | GitOps-driven reconciliation and deployment |
| Customization delivery | Full container image rebuilds | Overlay artifacts applied to the Liferay runtime filesystem at pod startup |
| Operational tooling | Liferay Cloud Console-centric workflows | Kubernetes-native tooling |
| Infrastructure management | Customer-visible platform operations | Managed infrastructure and platform integrations |
| Observability | Liferay Cloud Console monitoring | Grafana for metrics and runtime observability, GCP Cloud Logging for logs |
| Configuration management | Build-pipeline-oriented | GitOps-driven configuration management |
Core Concepts
GitOps-Based Operations
Environment configuration lives in Git repositories. Changes committed to the repository are synchronized into the cluster through Argo CD.
Overlay-Based Customization
Instead of rebuilding the full Liferay image, customizations are applied to the Liferay runtime filesystem during pod startup.
These overlay artifacts can include
- client extensions
- configuration files
- OSGi modules
- site initializers
Managed Infrastructure
Liferay manages
- Cloud provider integrations
- External Secrets Operator configuration
- Kubernetes infrastructure
- Monitoring and observability tooling
- Secret synchronization
You interact primarily through GitOps repositories and platform tooling rather than directly through cloud-provider infrastructure.
Platform Tools
Liferay PaaS Experience is built on Kubernetes-native tooling for managing and observing your environments. You sign in to some of these tools yourself; Liferay operates the rest on your behalf.
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Argo CD | GitOps synchronization and deployment management |
| Argo Workflows | Automated workflow execution |
| Grafana | Metrics and operational observability |
| GCP Cloud Logging | Log storage. You read these logs through Grafana rather than reaching Cloud Logging directly. |
| External Secrets Operator (ESO) | Synchronizes secrets into Kubernetes |
You access Argo CD, Argo Workflows, and Grafana through single sign-on. Liferay grants your account access to these tools when an administrator adds you as a PaaS User in Customer Portal (see User Management), and you log in with your own credentials rather than an administrator account.
Each tool shows you a restricted view. For example, Argo CD hides the Sync, History and Rollback, and Delete controls from customer logins, reserving those actions for GitOps workflows.
Liferay provides the URLs for Argo CD, Argo Workflows, and Grafana when it provisions your environment; they don’t follow a fixed, predictable pattern you can construct yourself.
Navigating Between Platform Tools
Grafana’s Central Hub dashboard opens by default when you log in to Grafana, so you can move between tools without tracking URLs separately. Its tiles open these destinations:
| Tile | Opens |
|---|---|
| GitHub Source | Your GitOps repository |
| ArgoCD | Argo CD |
| Argo Workflows | Argo Workflows |
| Alerts | Grafana’s alerting list, showing firing alerts and rules |
| Workloads | The Kubernetes Workloads dashboard |
| Backups | The Backups dashboard |
| Databases | The Databases dashboard |
| Load Balancers | The Load Balancers dashboard |
Central Hub also links to Liferay’s product documentation and the Liferay support portal.
It links to the tool or dashboard that owns each area rather than reproducing that data inline, so you check build, backup, and alert detail in the destination itself.
Liferay PaaS Experience vs. Cloud Native Experience
Liferay PaaS Experience shares many underlying architectural concepts with the Cloud Native Experience (CNE) offerings, particularly the GCP-ready model. The operational responsibilities differ:
| Area | CNE GCP-ready | Liferay PaaS Experience |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud project ownership | Customer | Liferay |
| IAM and cloud-provider setup | Customer | Managed by Liferay |
| Infrastructure management | Customer | Liferay |
| Primary operational interface | Cloud provider + GitOps | Argo CD + GitOps |
| Secret management backend | Customer-managed | Managed by Liferay |
For self-hosted deployments where your team manages the cloud project, infrastructure, and Kubernetes environment directly, see Cloud Native Experience (CNE).