AWS for content management
Since the introduction of Amazon Simple Storage Services (S3) in 2006, AWS has evolved into a powerful, responsive infrastructure that has helped shape the way in which applications are developed and how enterprises handle IT requirements — providing commodity-level access to a full range of cloud services. Several AWS characteristics make it well suited for content management tasks, including:
Fast, low-latency content distribution
Delivery of content over the web to end users using Amazon CloudFront is a fast, cost- effective way for handling everything from streaming video to entire dynamic websites. Through integration with other AWS offerings, such as S3 and EC2, content delivery can be optimized to take advantage of Amazon’s global network of edge locations, minimizing latency and boosting performance. As a usage-based service with no commitment, the only costs accrued derive from the actual volume of content delivered. Content collaboration can be handled efficiently with full access for workgroups spread out across multiple locations. Even extremely large files, such as those encountered in engineering projects and digital asset management environments, can be delivered securely worldwide — at high speed — to support collaborative efforts.
Inexpensive, reliable storage
S3, Amazon’s pioneering cloud storage service, continues to provide value to enterprises that require a reliable, scalable method for storing many kinds of digital assets in the cloud. Developers gain secure access to object containers, referred to as buckets, that are addressable by URL, located in a specified geographical region, and scalable to accommodate escalating storage demands.
Nuxeo Platform supports AWS storage types (Standard S3, S3 Object Lock, S3 Glacier), and it has the ability to define where content gets stored based on the document type, retention policy and/or the lifecycle state.
Elastic compute resources
Content-centric applications often place varying demands on compute resources for media processing, handling different levels of user traffic, data migration, sorting and indexing, and other tasks. AWS provides a number of elastic capabilities that can scale to meet demands, including the capability to scale out virtual servers (EC2), media transcoding (Elastic Transcoder), perform Auto Scaling and adjust load balancing (ELB).
Proven work environment
AWS has refined and enhanced its cloud service offerings over many years to ensure a secure and reliable work environment for the mission-critical applications encountered in content management operations. Important features are available and accessible, including database snapshots, automated load balancing, key performance metrics, high-volume bandwidth availability, monitoring and so on.
Other AWS capabilities support content-centric applications very effectively. For example, disaster recovery can be accomplished rapidly using failover techniques, minimizing downtime and potential enterprise losses from business interruptions. In digital asset management scenarios, back-end processing nodes can be separated from front-end servers so the scaling of images and video processing can be handled more efficiently.
AWS provides a capable IaaS framework for new-generation digital asset management projects, distributed content collaboration and global content distribution.