topic Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env in Alfresco Forum

Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

dadyodoo — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:11:45 GMT

I have a production server and a test server in a local network, and I want to deploy Alfresco 6 (ACS) in production in the production server and in test-dev environment in the server tests, but all is in local network no cloud.anyone can help!

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

kintu_barot — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 14:05:51 GMT

You can visit Deploying | Alfresco Documentation for the deployment.

Regards,

Kintu

ContCentric

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

dadyodoo — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 14:57:26 GMT

thanks for your answer, but i found that docker-compose is not for

production, and that kubernities is for clustered machines (cloud),

should i use docker for local deployment then I use zip distributions

for Alfresco 6?

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 3:06 PM kintu.barot@contcentric.com <

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jpotts — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 19:38:12 GMT

Why do you say Docker Compose is not for production?

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

dadyodoo — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 21:32:15 GMT

... using Docker Compose. This deployment method is only supported for development and test environments from Deploying using Docker Compose | Alfresco Documentation

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jpotts — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 15:03:27 GMT

Interesting. I think if you are a paying customer you should log a ticket confirming if you will be unsupported if you run using Docker Compose. I really doubt that will be the case. Some customers actually have no choice. For example, AWS GovCloud does not yet support Amazon EKS, so Kubernetes is not an option for Alfresco's federal government customers. That leaves either Compose or manually-installed components, and I can promise you support would rather those customers use containers than manually installs.

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

dadyodoo — Tue, 19 Feb 2019 15:34:24 GMT

Thank you for your reply,
I have another question Mr Jeff Potts, it is possible that with a single installation of Alfresco 6 Enterprise I can do two instances; one for the production on a Host in a local machine, and the other instance is for the test on another Host of another machine on the local network, or it is necessary to install two installations of Alfresco 6 and configure each one for testing and the other for production ?

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

binduwavell — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 15:44:53 GMT

The compose file provided in acs-deployment is not supported for production without some hardenimg effort. Like Jeff, I would doubt there is a strict ban on using compose itself. Worth creating a support ticket to confirm.

Jeff, if I remember correctly GovRAMP does not allow Docker deployments without a specific exception being approved. In which case you can likely get an exception for K8s as well. Then use something like kop to deploy and manage your own K8s cluster.

My understanding to date is that it is not straight forward to maintain and secure a production K8s cluster. Guidance I’ve had is that customers should have strong in house K8s resources before attempting to deploy production systems on it.

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jpotts — Sat, 02 Mar 2019 20:34:51 GMT

I actually filed a ticket with support for one of my customers who had this same question. Support's response was basically that customers are going to run Alfresco in a variety of ways and they aren't going to refuse to support a customer based on their deployment option. If an issue cannot be reproduced using K8s, though, then it may be up to the customer to prove the issue isn't due to how they've deployed.

Support also said that they have not done any performance testing using Docker Compose.

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jamilnour — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 14:37:50 GMT

Hello Jeff,

I am a paid customer and I am facing the same problem. After I worked with the support to fully install our customized Alfresco solution to AWS EKS (EFS) we faced an issue to upgrade the installation using K8s (Helm update). Support couldn't help me and answer my question for weeks (They told me they need to ask) then they closed the case.

We did our development and test using containers and right now we don't know how to proceed for our SaaS production service using Alfresco

I feel Alfresco is lost on this topic especially when we can read from the documentation:

“Alfresco Content Services is designed to be deployed using Docker images that are packaged in Helm charts (as a reference or basis for production deployments), or Docker Compose (for test and development environments only); there is no GUI installer.”

So no docker (as per the documentation) and no K8s (as per my installation with the support)

Is zip the only solution? The problem is that we saw our solution working well using K8s on AWS EKS until we tried to upgrade

Any comment will be appreciated

Thanks

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jpotts — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 22:13:57 GMT

Jamil, were you able to come up with a solution?

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jamilnour — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 22:47:04 GMT

Jeff, I got an official email from Alfresco to confirm that only zip deployment is the solution.

Too frustrating... we will not do the deployment using zip method...our container images are ready

The following is from Alfresco University about the deployment methods:

(zip) "This method is suitable for those organizations that are not yet ready to move to a containerized deployment approach for Alfresco Content Services"

We are ready and we paid and did the full steps as explained on AWS EKS but it seems Alfresco is not ready!!!

__________

Good afternoon,

Following internal discussions, Alfresco recommends that you install Version 6 to run into production using distribution zip. Without the necessary helm knowledge and Kubernetes/EKS understanding on your side, we would not recommend using this deployment method in production until sufficient expertise is obtained.

Per Alfresco’s statement on github, https://github.com/Alfresco/acs-deployment

“Production environments:

Alfresco provides tested Helm charts as a “deployment template” for customers who want to take advantage of the container orchestration benefits of Kubernetes. These Helm charts are undergoingcontinual development and improvement, and should not be used “as is” for your production environments, but should help you save time and effort deploying Alfresco Content Services for your organisation.”

The Alfresco Documentation site provides guidelines on how to go about deploying Alfresco 6.0 using distribution zip:

I sincerely regret the frustration that you’ve been experiencing but I’m also keen to be as straightforward as possible and offer a solution that enables you to spin up Alfresco with HA/Clustering enabled as quickly as possible so that you start to see the return in your investment.

Please let us know how you would like to proceed.

Re: Help deploying ACS 6: production & test env

jamilnour — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 03:17:01 GMT

Hello,

I am still trying to get the support on Docker-compose for production but unfortunately Alfresco has no progress on this :

Today's answer from the support:

"For PROD environments, ACS is designed to be deployed using Docker images that are packaged in Helm charts.
Using Docker Compose, this is intended to be used in DEV and TEST environments. If implementing this method for PROD, this is not supported."

Note that since more than 9 months I have our solution based on ACS 6.1 and using docker-compose is in production with no problem at all. I am using Azure Disaster recovery on the docker VM. My client wants to use Azure and not AWS so I can't use AWS Helm charts.

For a new client, I want to have support from Alfresco for clustering with Disaster Recovery on an on premise installation. Docker-compose is a ready deployment for us but Alfresco is still not collaborating and wants us to use ZIP

Thanks

Jamil