Alfresco teams with RightScale on cloud management

Open source content management vendor, Alfresco [1] announced today a new partnership with RightScale [2], a SaaS cloud management vendor that should help Alfresco customers manage and deploy their Alfresco cloud solutions faster and more efficiently. Alfresco claims the beauty of this partnership is the ability to scale resources instantly to the needs of the application, which if true could greatly simplify cloud-based deployments.

Using RightScale, Alfresco customers can use only the servers they need at any given time. This could be particularly useful for retailers, for example, this time of year when holiday traffic could drive up server usage. Rather than having to buy server time, based on guess work of how much they will need, customers can let RightScale deal with the scaling issues in real time. And after the holidays when the traffic fades to normal levels, the customer can let RightScale automatically dial down the server requirements. If it works in this fashion, it offers Alfresco customers a great service that should reduce overall deployment and maintenance costs and take the guess work out of server needs.

Alfresco CEO, John Powell says, this should simplify cloud building for his customers. "More and more of our enterprise-level customers are taking advantage of the cloud environment, and we are well-positioned to continue to expand capabilities in this area,” Powell said. “Our partnership with RightScale builds on Alfresco’s existing foundation as a flexible, scalable and low-cost solution and will further streamline the process of building complex architectures around Alfresco in the cloud.”

It certainly sounds like a great plan for Alfresco customers looking to deploy applications in the cloud by giving them a cost-effective and seemingly automated way to deal with the tricky issues of deployment and management. I have the feeling there is probably some more fine tuning involved here than they let on, but if it works even close to the way they describe, it should give customers a combined open source and SaaS solution platform on which to build cloud applications.

For more information:
- see the Alfresco press release [3]

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