Modernize Your Document Management System with AWS Serverless and Noventiq

By Yogesh Kumar Sharma, Head of Application Modernization – Noventiq
By Chris Zheng, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect, App Modernization – AWS

Noventiq

A traditional document management system (DMS) is hosted in on-premises servers or data centers to organize, store, track, and manage documents within an organization. A serverless DMS, meanwhile, is hosted in the cloud and managed by a cloud service provider. This removes the need for managing and provisioning traditional servers while ensuring scalability and flexibility.

Organizations that are using a traditional DMS have been deriving the benefits of reliability, time savings, faster document retrieval, collaboration, and visibility into document processes and customization for a long time. While the traditional approach has worked out well so far, businesses face changing needs that are setting demands of scalability, agility, cost savings, easy management, and accessibility.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a wide range of services that enable cutting-edge document management systems built on serverless architecture to address these needs.

In this post, we will share how Noventiq developed uDMS, a smart document management system using AWS serverless architecture and services. Noventiq is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP) that guides seamless migration, secure architecture, and optimized solutions for business and big data goals.

Benefits of a Serverless Document Management System

For many organizations, the challenges of a traditional DMS include:

Costs: IT team has to handle updates, server management, and troubleshooting leading to higher maintenance overheads.
Accessibility: A traditional DMS is mostly built on virtual private network (VPN)-connected networks, making global accessibility and collaboration a challenge.
Updates and scaling: A traditional DMS requires the IT team to handle updates and patches while managing servers and data backup. With traditional hardware, scaling can be cost-intensive as complex programs require new hardware.

The implementation of a serverless DMS offers various benefits in organizational efficiency and resource management.

The burden of maintenance overheads is effectively controlled, as a proficient cloud provider assumes responsibility for updates, security patches for services, and the seamless orchestration of system performance. This not only ensures a consistently optimized operational environment, but also facilitates cost efficiency through a pay-per-request model and the ability to scale resources flexibly.

A cloud-based DMS also fosters a globalized work environment by simplifying accessibility and promoting efficient collaboration across geographic boundaries. The incorporation of access controls, compliance mechanisms, and encryption protocols within the DMS safeguard sensitive information.

Lastly, the serverless nature of the DMS contributes to accelerated deployment processes, swift user adoption, and seamless integration with a variety of services and applications. Its inherent design ensures high availability while minimizing downtime.

Why AWS is Ideal for a Serverless DMS Architecture

The robust suite of services, scalability, reliability, ease of use and usage-based costing are a few reasons why AWS is a popular choice for deploying a serverless DMS.

AWS offers serverless services like AWS Lambda for compute, Amazon API Gateway for API management, Amazon Simple Storage Services (Amazon S3) for storage, and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for database requirements. AWS Lambda and RDS come with auto-scaling capabilities which enable large loads of document uploads, downloads, and processing on a demand basis.

AWS’s global infrastructure and multi-Availability Zone (AZ) architecture provides high-performance and resilient services in more than 30 regions around the world. AWS also offers advantages like flexible pricing, managed services, security, integration, and advanced developer tools.

uDMS – A Smart Document Management System

Noventiq built the uDMS application to take advantage of the modernization capabilities of AWS to address the need for speed, agility, and security.

uDMS makes it easy to modernize document management with a modern set of capabilities:

Easy management of documents and their properties using a document explorer interface that helps track document progress through a workflow pipeline. This feature is built on Rest APIs that smoothly integrate with line of business applications.
Simplified metadata management with tagged metadata defined as templates by business users such as claim documents and underwriting documents.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model along with dynamic folder and metadata creation of individual organization, coupled with optical character recognition (OCR), functionality helps process large volumes of text data quickly and accurately.
Nested hierarchy of folders offers flexibility in folder management.
Helps improve e-compliance and policy management with conditional and scheduled notifications that trigger workflows to enforce policies on specific documents.
Supports multiple file formats, versioning, sharing, and audit trail.

Figure 1 – uDMS solution architecture.

Solution Architecture

A Lambda/RESTful API drives all of the backend activities and business logic, while the frontend application connects with the backend via RESTful APIs.

uDMS is built on a serverless architecture, using Python for the development of the backend RESTful APIs, and Angular for the frontend web application. The application is powered by AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway, while the RESTful APIs are published via Amazon API Gateway. The uDMS frontend is deployed on Amazon S3 and published via Amazon CloudFront.

AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway enable a high-performing DMS that ensures speed, scalability, agility, performance, cost savings, and easy management. Coupled with each other, the services help build a serverless architecture that facilitates application modernization, innovation, security, monitoring, and efficient API development.

Angular is a TypeScript framework for building web applications and apps in JavaScript, HTML, and TypeScript, which is a super set of JavaScript used to deploy static code for an application.

Django is a Python-based free and open-source web framework, which follows the model-template-view architectural pattern. It’s a web framework and set of components that provide a standard way to develop websites fast and easily.

Backend Architecture

Figure 2 – Backend architecture.

Key components of the uDMS backend system are listed as follow:

Django frameworks is loosely coupled, enabling more agile development.
For any action made on the application, the frontend sends the API request to the routers.
Routers manage navigation of the request received and redirects the request APIs to the view section.
View contains all business logic of application and has all application logic to be presented to the frontend. It retrieves the data from the database via the model, formats it, bundles it up in an HTTP response object, and sends it to the frontend in JSON.
The model manages the data of the application, interacts with the database, and has object relational mapping. It responds to all create, update, retrieve queries, and fetches data from database.

Frontend Architecture

Figure 3 – Frontend architecture.

Key components of the uDMS frontend system are listed as follow:

App components is where all of the modules are managed through routing. It contains the CSS, HTML, and TypeScript files for building the user interface (UI) on the browser.
Routers enable navigation from one view to the next, while app modules provide a bootstrap mechanism to launch the application and contains all functional mechanisms. As the application has users at the application administration and organization levels, it has multiple authentication modules as users perform tasks. Single-sign on (SSO) is also leveraged for authentication, and the router contains all navigation paths for all modules, submodules, and components.
The app functionality is divided into different modules on the basis of the API group and each module is lazy loaded.
The modules are further bifurcated into submodules and further components. The components are the final step the UI creates on the browser using HTML and CSS files.

How uDMS is Enhanced by AWS Services

Faster data processing: For the documents to be processed effectively, AWS Lambda picks up, processes, and stores the data and helps run various other processes in the background. With the ability to process huge loads of records within minutes, scale applications continuously, Lambda requires no management or infrastructure provisioning.
Efficiency, performance, and low cost: For ensuring smooth integration of applications, Amazon API Gateway enables uDMS to use RESTful APIs to connect several frontend applications and backend components. HTTP APIs create RESTful APIs that enable lower costs and latency.
Other AWS services: Additionally, uDMS is enriched in terms of easy deployment and management, flexibility, scalability, security, monitoring, and visibility by AWS services like Amazon S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), AWS Secrets Manager, AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM), and Amazon CloudWatch.

Conclusion

Noventiq’s uDMS smart document management system is built on AWS serverless architecture enables scalability, cost efficiency, high availability, enhanced security, and multiple integrations. It helps streamline document handling, improves collaboration, and is a reliable, fast, and flexible solution for managing documents for your business needs.

Learn more about Noventiq’s application modernization capabilities.

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Noventiq – AWS Partner Spotlight

Noventiq is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and MSP that guides seamless migration, secure architecture, and optimized solutions for business and big data goals.

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