Alfresco Content Services on the AWS Cloud: Quick Start Reference Deployment

Posted on: Apr 10, 2017

This new Quick Start automatically deploys an Alfresco Content Services cluster on the AWS Cloud. It replaces the Quick Start for Alfresco One with Alfresco Content Services 5.2 and adds Amazon Aurora support. 

Alfresco Content Services is an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system that is used for document and case management, project collaboration, web content publishing, and compliant records management. Alfresco Content Services 5.2 provides open, flexible, highly scalable ECM capabilities. Content is accessible wherever and however you work, and easily integrates with your other business applications. New capabilities with this release include:

  • Widely expanded REST APIs (which are a core enabler for the new Application Development Framework)
  • Separation of Search Services and update to Solr 6

The Quick Start was created by AWS in partnership with Alfresco Software, to integrate solutions and services from both companies.

The flexible compute, storage, and database services that AWS offers make it an ideal platform for Alfresco Content Services. This Quick Start presents an enterprise-grade Alfresco Content Services configuration that you can adapt to virtually any scenario, and scale up, down, or out, depending on your use case. 

The Quick Start architecture includes the following components:

  • Highly available Alfresco Content Services servers and Index servers deployed across two Availability Zones within your selected region. The servers take advantage of Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing, with CPU-based thresholds that you can customize.
  • Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for shared file storage.
  • Amazon Aurora with Multi-AZ enabled for the shared database, except for the EU (Frankfurt) Region, where Amazon Relational Database System (Amazon RDS) for MySQL is deployed instead.

The Alfresco Content Services deployment is automated by nested AWS CloudFormation templates. The templates call custom Chef cookbooks to automate installation and configuration tasks for Alfresco Content Services. The Quick Start gives you a option to either build a new AWS environment for Alfresco Content Services or use your existing AWS environment. 

The Quick Start also includes a deployment guide, which describes the reference architecture, provides step-by-step instructions for deploying the Quick Start, and discusses Alfresco Content Services customization options in detail. 

To get started with Alfresco Content Services on AWS, use the following resources:

About Quick Starts
Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key workloads on the AWS Cloud. Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability. This is the latest in a series of Quick Starts built by AWS in collaboration with AWS partners to automate the deployment of popular products and technologies on AWS.