Alfresco's adaptation to Google Cloud involved a series of strategic changes in its architecture, and here is how we did it.

Digital transformation has driven many companies to adopt cloud solutions to improve the efficiency and scalability of their operations. At Incentro, we have more than ten years of experience in implementing and maintaining installations of Alfresco, a leading enterprise content management (ECM) platform. At the same time, as cloud computing became more prevalent, we decided to strengthen our collaboration with Google Cloud.

With this dual specialisation, and although Alfresco is designed to be a cloud-native solution for Amazon Web Services (AWS), we have successfully adapted it to Google Cloud, taking advantage of the managed services that this platform offers. This article describes how we went about this transformation and the benefits we achieved.

The adaptation of Alfresco to Google Cloud involved a series of strategic changes to its architecture in order to use the managed services of this provider, which are detailed below.

Alfresco natively uses ActiveMQ for message queue management. We decided to replace ActiveMQ with Google Cloud Pub/Sub, an asynchronous messaging service fully managed by Google. Pub/Sub provides greater scalability and reliability, enabling efficient communication between distributed Alfresco components.

The database is a critical component for any ECM system. We modified the database integration and adapted the database to work with Google Cloud SQL, a managed service that supports multiple database engines, including MySQL and PostgreSQL. Cloud SQL simplifies database administration, providing high availability, automatic scalability and regular backup.

With this change, and sticking to the SLAs offered by Google Cloud SQL, a monthly availability of >=99.99% is achieved. This last figure clearly illustrates the stability of this solution.

For the storage of documents and unstructured data, we adopted the persistence layer to Google Cloud Storage. This service offers object storage with high durability and availability, ensuring that Alfresco data is always accessible and protected against loss. Another important point is that the content is multiregionally distributed, which offers greater guarantees in terms of access to the content. The availability SLA offered by Google for this service is >=99.9% per month.

Although Cloud Storage offers a wide range of possibilities, we can also deploy this solution using other storage options in Google Cloud, such as Persistent Disks or Filestore.

To manage the Alfresco infrastructure, we use Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). GKE allows you to deploy, manage and scale containerised applications with ease, ensuring high performance and availability. Kubernetes enables easy management of distributed workloads and improves system resiliency.

Integration with Google Cloud managed services has resulted in a much more stable system. Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage and Google Kubernetes Engine provide high availability (greater than 99% uptime) and scalability, decreasing downtime, improving system reliability and enabling efficient handling of peak demand without human intervention.

The use of managed services has freed the IT team from many administrative and time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic and value-added activities.

Google Cloud offers advanced security features that protect data and applications, meeting the strictest compliance standards and enabling a high level of granularity in permissions management. By working in an ecosystem such as Google Cloud, we take advantage of a continuously evolving and improving system, powered by an industry-leading platform.

Alfresco's adaptation of Alfresco to Google Cloud by Incentro is an outstanding example of how innovation and expertise can transform and optimise business services. By leveraging Google Cloud managed services, we have significantly improved the stability, robustness and scalability of Alfresco installations, delivering a more efficient and reliable solution to our customers. This success story underscores the value of strategic collaboration and adaptability in today's technology environment.