Deployment architecture

The way Alfresco Content Services is deployed and run in version 6.0 changes dramatically from previous versions. Docker and Kubernetes are now used and there are no installers.

Introduction

The way you deploy and run the Alfresco Content Services solution has changed significantly in version 6.0. Traditionally you would download an installer that would install Java, Tomcat, Database, WARs, tools, etc., and things would be configured to work together. Then you would use a script to kick things off. That’s no longer the case and there are no installers available. We will be working with Docker containers instead.

It’s now possible to kick off Alfresco Content Services from a number of Docker images. These images are available in the https://hub.docker.com [1] repository. However, kicking off individual Docker containers based on these images, and configuring them to work together, might not be the most productive way to get up and running with Alfresco Content Services. To make things easier, and achieve a one-click to deploy and run solution, a Docker compose file is available to quickly deploy and run Alfresco Content Services when you need to test something or work on a proof-of-concept (PoC).

There are also Helm Charts available to deploy the solution in production as a Kubernetes cluster in for example AWS.

Docker Architecture

When Alfresco Content Services is deployed with Docker it looks something like this:

As we can see in the above figure, a number of Docker images are deployed to make up the Alfresco Content Services solution:

alfresco/alfresco-share - the Alfresco Share web interface (i.e. share.war) running on Apache Tomcat
alfresco/alfresco-search-services - the Solr 6 based search service running on Jetty
alfresco/alfresco-content-repository - the Alfresco Repository app (i.e. alfresco.war) running on Apache Tomcat

There are also other supporting features available, such as Docker images for image and document transformation:

alfresco/alfresco-imagemagick
alfresco/alfresco-libreoffice
alfresco/alfresco-alfresco-pdf-renderer

To build the alfresco/alfresco-content-repository image Alfresco uses the https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-packaging [2] project. This project also includes a Docker Compose script that can be used to launch a demo, test, or PoC system. You can customize this script if you like in order to run with different versions than those set by default, which are usually the latest versions.

Kubernetes Architecture

Alfresco Content Services cluster deployments are managed via Kubernetes container orchestrator. The deployment architecture is defined with the Helm tool.