Alfresco today announced the availability of RightScale templates that facilitate the deployment of scalable and elastic Alfresco clusters. I emphasize “elastic” because I believe this is one of the key principles that distinguish a “true” cloud computing strategy from a vendor versus simply making single-server, non-clustered product images available.
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Understand that there’s nothing wrong with having single-server images, Alfresco has had EC2 images available since October and we will continue to maintain and evolve them. But if a vendor claims to have a “cloud strategy” and that having public EC2 images encompasses the entirety of that strategy, then they either a) don’t get it or b) are misleading their customers.
Here at Alfresco, we’ve been quietly yet actively working with cloud platforms such as EC2, GoGrid and RackSpace and feel that the timing is right to put forth our strategy not just for the cloud, but also for emphasizing Alfresco’s utility as a Content Platform that can be leveraged to develop Content Rich applications that can then deployed to any kind of runtime environment, be it a traditional Data Center, Virtualized Infrastructure or Public & Private Clouds.
This strategy relies on a few trends that Alfresco has been actively endorsing as well as some specific product features that we hope will make Alfresco a very accessible and powerful framework that is attractive to developers.
The most significant of these trends and features are:
- CMIS: The new “lingua franca” of content management. Empowers developers with a standardized mechanism for leveraging content repositories.
- Spring Surf: Alfresco recently donated the Surf Framework to SpringSource as a Spring Extension. Spring Surf offers Spring developers a more convenient way to develop SpringMVC web applications and can optionally connect these apps into a content repository using CMIS.
- Scalability, Manageability & Configurability: We’ve made great strides in making Alfresco one of most scalable ECM platforms in the industry, but have gone beyond that by adding JMX support and revamping the configuration mechanism thereby dramatically improving the way that IT operations can manage their Alfresco servers. These capabilities are absolutely pivotal to Alfresco’s cloud strategy.
Virtually all web applications make use of content, yet very few of them are actually backed by any kind of content repository. The aforementioned three points are the pillars on top of which developers can create and deploy a new breed of content-enabled applications that are backed by Alfresco’s CMIS-compliant repository. These new applications can be social, e-commerce, multimedia, business-oriented or anything else. More importantly, developers now have the flexibility to easily deploy to their preferred environment knowing that Alfresco can be properly managed regardless of where it’s deployed.
We emphasize the “cloud” because it conveniently allows for an environment to scale on-demand based on metrics such as performance or query volume, but understand that the same principles can be applied to more traditional environments as well.
In any case, I invite readers to attend the webinars we’ve got scheduled for after the new year and send any questions to cloud -at- alfresco -dot- com.
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