Just to add my vote for the requirement of a ColdFusion staging license. Yes we have the developer license for local development but for a none forward facing staging server it’s often not practical to use the development edition due to the IP restrictions.
Whilst we have full licenses for our staging server currently, they’re mostly wasted because we don’t have sites in ‘staging status’ all the time but when we do we may have more than one so can’t get away with using the developers version.
Plus, when it comes to upgrading our production CF licenses we end up having to purchase two licenses (ok, Adobe may like this) one for our live environment and one to keep staging at the same level as production.
Maybe throw a popup after a certain number of page requests, insert text into the html stream, limit the number of page requests then require a CF restart, watermarking seems an obvious choice but that sometimes messes with xml/json packets etc being generated. Or how about, if we could purchase additional IP blocks for a nominal amount? That way we could buy an additional 5 IP block and add that to the development version giving us 7 IPs.
But please Adobe, here the pleas for some kind of staging server license!
June 26th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I like the idea of buying additional blocks of IPs.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
I like that idea of additional blocks of IP as well!!!!
June 26th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
How about setting up production with multiple instances and use one instance for staging.
June 26th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
@chris
that would assume you are using CF Enterprise - if you are then yes, that’s definitely an options but some folk really don’t like production/staging on the same server. One thing we are looking at though is virtualised environments so a client server can have two virtual servers, one for staging and one for production - with production having higher priority obviously.
There again, for two servers/environments CF Standard still works out a better option financially over CF Enterprise.
June 26th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I also like the idea of ordering licenses for extra IPs, it could also help out in other situations where you have a CF powered site but a limited audience.
But in my experience ordering licenses from Adobe is a horrible lengthy affair that requires lots of chasing. They seriously need to modernise their license ordering and delivery system. The problem isn’t just with CF licenses.
June 26th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
@Kris
That would be stupid, they should be separate boxes. Bad bad idea.
I think that we need something to allow us to have REAL staging environments.
June 26th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
@Jake
It depends on your server load, nature of the applications and use of the staging server. It is not always necessary to have two machines. If you are writing in-house applications and the production server is <60% utilized and you have CF Enterprise, then there is not a real problem with it.
If you only have CF Standard then I would not consider it. I agree that this may not be ideal, but it would work.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Well, as someone who has an Enterprise license on shared dev (for basic integration testing) and an Enterprise license on staging (for pre-production testing) and four Enterprise licenses on our production cluster - and looking at doubling up our dev/stage setup for multi-branch development - I’d certainly be happy to have some sort of cheaper dev/stage license for internal only usage. It really hurts to have to spend $7,500 per internal box (less whatever discount I negotiate with Adobe each time we buy licenses).
It’s almost forcing us to double up instances or go to VMs for internal use which is not really how we want our environments setup (i.e., forced to have multiple branches of code on the same server). We’d rather each server was like a mini-replica of production.
June 27th, 2008 at 1:05 am
Agreed, this has been an issue for years. I would love Adobe to come to the table with an offer to make it easier to manager testing/staging server licenses.
+1
July 3rd, 2008 at 4:07 pm
[...] John Beynon thinks there should be a “staging” license of Adobe’s ColdFusion server. What do you think? [...]