• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
TSB Alfresco Cobrand White tagline

Technology Services Group

  • Home
  • Products
    • Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
    • OpenContent Search
    • OpenContent Case
    • OpenContent Forms
    • OpenMigrate
    • OpenContent Web Services
    • OpenCapture
    • OpenOverlay
  • Solutions
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Claims Management
      • Claims Demo Series
    • Alfresco Content Accelerator for Policy & Procedure Management
      • Compliance Demo Series
    • OpenContent Accounts Payable
    • OpenContent Contract Management
    • OpenContent Batch Records
    • OpenContent Government
    • OpenContent Corporate Forms
    • OpenContent Construction Management
    • OpenContent Digital Archive
    • OpenContent Human Resources
    • OpenContent Patient Records
  • Platforms
    • Alfresco Consulting
      • Alfresco Case Study – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Philharmonic
      • Alfresco Case Study – New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Society for Clinical Pathology
      • Alfresco Case Study – American Association of Insurance Services
      • Alfresco Case Study – United Cerebral Palsy
    • HBase
    • DynamoDB
    • OpenText & Documentum Consulting
      • Upgrades – A Well Documented Approach
      • Life Science Solutions
        • Life Sciences Project Sampling
    • Veeva Consulting
    • Ephesoft
    • Workshare
  • Case Studies
    • White Papers
    • 11 Billion Document Migration
    • Learning Zone
    • Digital Asset Collection – Canadian Museum of Human Rights
    • Digital Archive and Retrieval – ASCP
    • Digital Archives – New York Philharmonic
    • Insurance Claim Processing – New York Property Insurance
    • Policy Forms Management with Machine Learning – AAIS
    • Liferay and Alfresco Portal – United Cerebral Palsy of Greater Chicago
  • About
    • Contact Us
  • Blog

Alfresco and Amazon Web Services – Advantages compared to an on premise Alfresco solution.

You are here: Home / Alfresco / Alfresco and Amazon Web Services – Advantages compared to an on premise Alfresco solution.

January 26, 2018

Amazon Web Services provides not only cost benefits but also a variety of different capabilities that can enhance an Alfresco implementation compared to on premise implementations.  This post will present the unique features from our “Alfresco – Moving to Amazon Web Services Whitepaper”.

Download Alfresco to AWS Guide

Taking Advantage of Amazon Services for your ECM Implementation

As mentioned throughout this paper, hosting Alfresco on AWS provides many benefits over on-premise solutions.  For innovative Alfresco customers, other benefits are available, particularly when it comes to the storage of the documents themselves and S3.  This figure illustrates AWS services used by several of our clients. As described in earlier sections, there are minimal components for a successful deployment. This diagram shows how our clients are innovating on AWS.

This section will present some of those ideas for consideration.

  • Glacier Archives & Vault Lock –With the large volumes of data stored in S3 there is the potential to save money by moving content to Glacier’s low-cost storage tier. Glacier data is stored within Archives that are then stored within Vaults. Beyond the simple storage of content, Glacier works with S3’s content lifecycle rules and Glacier Vaults can implement a Vault Lock policy to enforce compliance controls concerning the retention and disposition of documents.
  • S3 API –S3 has a robust API for directly accessing stored objects. TSG has taken advantage of this capability within our OpenContent Management Suite to upload/download content directly from the S3 object store to increase performance, particularly for large files and video streaming, while reducing the load on the Alfresco server.
  • Metadata on S3 – Amazon supports metadata on S3, up to a 2K limit.  TSG still recommends all metadata be stored in Alfresco, but having some of the metadata on S3 allows for some creative solutions, including replication as well as potential for searching S3 directly for objects. An additional method to store metadata on S3 is as either JSON or XML files alongside content files in the S3 bucket. By storing the metadata in a separate file, it is available to additional AWS services such as Athena, CloudSearch, and RedShift.
  • S3 Lifecyles – Lifecyles are an optional S3 feature for controlling the storage behavior of an object within an S3 bucket. For example, a lifecycle can specify that after 60 days an object should move to S3 Infrequent Access (S3-IA) storage and then after an additional 30 days move to Glacier and finally after 2,555 days (7 years) from its creation be destroyed. A good lifecycle can enforce compliance rules and save significant storage costs.
  • AWS CloudFront – CloudFront is a Content Distribution Network (CDN) with capabilities to publish S3 objects to edge storage locations around the world. Cloudfront provides for streaming and quick access to the S3 object store without going through the Alfresco API to store or retrieve the object, a feature not easily replicated with an on-premise Alfresco solution.  TSG has taken advantage of this capability within our OpenContent Management Suite to upload/download content directly from the S3 object store to increase performance, particularly for large files and video streaming, while reducing the load on the Alfresco server.
  • AWS Elastic Transcoder – Amazon has been processing video for years. AWS Elastic Transcoder can handle a myriad of video and audio formats, transforming them from one file format to another. This is ideal for rendering videos into formats for streaming or annotating. It becomes possible to accept several common video formats from users and transcode them into a single format for consistency and use in OpenAnnotate Video as mp4 files. Elastic Transcoder uses AWS Simple Queue Service (SQS) to process transcoding jobs, moving the files to and from S3 buckets.
  • AWS AutoScaling – Over time, the typical document management solution has a slow and steady increase of content and usage.  However, for scenarios which require a large ingestion of content initially or a huge increase in users, Amazon EC2 provides the flexibility to scale up or down as needed. Alfresco’s Quick Start uses Chef to bootstrap and dynamically add and remove instances from the auto-scaling group.
  • AWS CloudWatch – AWS CloudWatch is used to monitor the health and behavior of EC2 instances and other AWS services. Applications may also send metrics to CloudWatch so they can be observed. AWS AutoScaling can be triggered by CloudWatch metrics, for example, a decision to launch another EC2 instance can be made if the existing CPU usage exceeds 80% for 5 minutes. Multiple thresholds for behavior can be defined and alarms set to alert a Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic which might send an email or text message to alert an administrator. The CloudWatch service provides the toolset to establish proactive management of an AWS solution.
  • Encryption – AWS provides encryption within several services. For Alfresco solutions, AWS offers encryption within the S3 object store, EBS volumes, and RDS databases. AWS Certificate Manager provides a hassle-free means for creating and managing SSL certificates. With AWS encryption, additional software components like Alfresco encryption are no longer required. Encryption keys can be controlled, rotated, and renewed by AWS or by the customer using AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
  • AWS CloudTrail & VPC Flow Logs – These two AWS services provide the means to monitor and respond to low-level application and network traffic. AWS CloudTrail records AWS API-level traffic and ships the logs to S3. These logs can be used to track actions against services and to troubleshoot issues. The VPC Flow Logs are available in AWS CloudWatch and will monitor the IP traffic going into and out of the VPC. This data can help with troubleshooting configurations and knowing what traffic is coming into the instances and from where.

To download the full whitepaper that includes a step by step guide on how to install and migrate from Legacy or On-Premise to Alfresco in Amazon Web Services, select on the download button below.

Download Alfresco to AWS Guide

Filed Under: Alfresco, Amazon

Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. Alfresco on AWS – Achieving High Availability says:
    June 13, 2018 at 2:21 pm

    […] This post has surveyed the most common architecture used to deploy a high availability Alfresco system on AWS. There are many additional AWS services that support a high availability environment you can read more about them in our Alfresco on AWS white paper. […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

Search

Related Posts

  • Amazon S3 – Viewing content fast and securely in-browser with the Alfresco Enterprise Viewer
  • FileNet AWS Cloud Native? Thoughts on recent announcement
  • ECM 2.0 – Cloud for Metadata and On Premise Document/Object Storage
  • ECM 2.0 – Can you build it yourself?
  • AWS & Alfresco – AAIS Case Study – Insurance Policy Management and Machine Learning
  • ECM Large Repositories – Volume Testing With the TSG Test Harness
  • FileNet to AWS – An 80 Million Document Case Study
  • ECM 2.0 – What does it mean?
  • Redaction for AWS, Alfresco, Documentum and Hadoop – Bulk Redaction upon Ingestion or Migration
  • Case Analytics for Insurance

Recent Posts

  • Alfresco Content Accelerator and Alfresco Enterprise Viewer – Improving User Collaboration Efficiency
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Document Notification Distribution Lists
  • Alfresco Webinar – Productivity Anywhere: How modern claim and policy document processing can help the new work-from-home normal succeed
  • Alfresco – Viewing Annotations on Versions
  • Alfresco Content Accelerator – Collaboration Enhancements
stacks-of-paper

11 BILLION DOCUMENT
BENCHMARK
OVERVIEW

Learn how TSG was able to leverage DynamoDB, S3, ElasticSearch & AWS to successfully migrate 11 Billion documents.

Download White Paper

Footer

Search

Contact

22 West Washington St
5th Floor
Chicago, IL 60602

inquiry@tsgrp.com

312.372.7777

Copyright © 2022 · Technology Services Group, Inc. · Log in

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Please accept this site's cookies, but you can opt-out if you wish. Privacy Policy ACCEPT | Cookie settings
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these cookies, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may have an effect on your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT