Alfresco Offers Program for Cloud Based Application Development

By Barb Mosher | Published Sep 17, 2009

Alfresco (news, site) has launched a new developer program designed to support cloud-based development on the Alfresco Enterprise CMS platform.

Called the Cloud Content Application Developer Program, it includes a developer toolkit and an Amazon EC2-ready stack.

Alfresco on Ubuntu

The Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is for Alfresco 3.2 Community Edition. It is built on Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, leveraging the Alfresco package from the Canonical partner repository.

Canonical first started offering Alfresco bundled with Ubuntu in August of last year. Just recently, they updated their bundle to include Alfresco's latest community version 3.2. Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution within the Alfresco community.

Here's a video demonstrating the install of the Amazon image:

Launching Alfresco AMI installation

Once you are installed and up and running you can easily log into either Alfresco Share or the Alfresco Web Explorer. Additional links are offered for EC2 release notes, CMIS documentation, Alfresco community and more.

This is, of course, an open source offer. But Alfresco does intend to offer a subscription for those who will want enterprise support 24/7.

Embracing Alfresco in the Cloud

Alfresco has been developing partnerships to help leverage their enterprise content management system in cloud based environment without loosing all the security and scalability of an on-premise install.

In June they announced a partnership with Parascale, a cloud storage software provider. This partnership has enabled the Alfresco platform to exist on the same servers that support the cloud infrastructure, thus reducing the cost associated with cloud computing.

You can learn more about how to leverage Alfresco in a "content-as-a-service" scenario via an on-demand webinar on the Alfresco website.