…On AWS, in High Availability, Auto scalable and Multi AZ support.
Back in 2013 we (at Alfresco) released an AWS CloudFormation template that allow you to deploy an Alfresco Enterprise cluster in Amazon Web Services and I talked about it here.
Today, I’m proud to announce that we have rewritten that template to make it work with our new modern stack and version of Alfresco One (5.1). We also put a lot of effort in place to make this new template an Alfresco One Reference Architecture, not only because it is in hight availability, but because we use our latest automation tools like Chef-Alfresco and our experience on tuning but also best practices learned during our latest benchmarks and related to architecture security. In addition to that and to make it faster to deploy, we are using the official Alfresco One AMI published in the AWS Marketplace.
I’d like to mention some features you will find in this new template:
- All Alfresco and Index nodes will be placed inside a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
- Each Alfresco and Index nodes will be in a separate Availability Zone (same Region).
- We use Alfresco One 5.1.1.1 with Alfresco Offices Services and Google Docs plugin.
- All configuration is done automatically using Chef-Alfresco, you don’t really need to know about Chef to make this work.
- An Elastic Load Balancer instance with “sticky” sessions based on the Tomcat JSESSIONID.
- Shared content store is in a S3 bucket.
- MySQL database on RDS instances in Multi-AZ mode.
- We use a pre-baked AMI. Our official Alfresco One AMI published in the AWS Marketplace, based on CentOS 7.2 and with an all-in-one configuration that we reconfigure automatically to work for this architecture and save time.
- Auto-scaling rules that will add extra Alfresco and Index nodes when certain performance thresholds are reached.
- HTTPS access to Alfresco Share not enabled by default but all set to enable it.
As a result of this deployment you will get this environment:
Our CloudFormation Template and additional documentation is available in Github. https://github.com/Alfresco/alfresco-cloudformation-chef
In the video below you can see a quick demo about how to deploy this infrastructure in just few minutes of user intervention. Isn’t is cool? Do you know how much time you save doing it this way? And also set up a production and test environment exactly the same way, faster, easier and cheaper!