Better support for articy:server on cloud platforms

[windex]

There are some other cloud topics but they aren't this, or they're asking you to offer a SaaS model (which is probably commercially unsustainable and commits you to providing data security which is a bad business to be in).

I just licensed up the server the other day on Microsoft's Azure, but the listed system requirements for memory listed for the server push it into a relatively large VM image, which has a cost of a few hundred USD a month to operate.

I'm not really willing to figure out how far this can be reduced because my day job involves providing resolutions to end-users as a mediator to software developers who often times don't consider edge cases.

My team is geographically distributed (Japan/North America/England) and we're using Azure's point-to-site VPN to help protect assets stored in the cloud.

Ideally, it would be possible to deploy the server service alone then manage it entirely from another machine, which should help. Azure and AWS both list memory limits per tier on their public websites and they change from time to time, but for reference on Azure, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 97896.aspx .

For what it's worth everything was deployed on an A3/Standard Azure VM over remote desktop and is working fine behind the VPN.

Thoughts?

Thanks.

[Kai Rosenkranz]

Hi windex,

Thanks for reaching out and sharing your cloud-relatved - but not at all cloudy - thoughts.
I just wanted to let you know that I have passed this post on to our tech team. They'll get back to you soon with a more proficient answer than I could provide on this matter.

Best,
-Kai

[[Articy] Peter Sabath]

Hi windex,

until now we did not do any special coding for cloud support, but it should be possible to use MS Azure for that.

Here are some points that might help you to better understand what is going on under the hood.

• articy:server is a small windows service that normally uses less then 50MB of memory.
• It's database file is also very small because it only stores user profile and project meta data along with some licensing and user-rights data.
• For a cloud installation, you should not check the "Articy Server Management Client" install option.
• You should not use Remote Desktop to administer the server. You can use any articy:draft client and connect as user "ServerAdmin" to manage the server.

Using this setup you do not need DirectX on the server and have a minimal memory and disk-space footprint.

The part that is much more memory and disk space consuming is the source control component (either Subversion or Perforce).
Both can also be used from a UNIX/Linux environment and may be available as cloud build and need not be running on the same machine as the articy:server.

The internal SVN server is perfect for a quick start or small teams but should not be used in such an advanced configuration.

You should add -nosvn on a single line in your articyserver.cfg file as described here.
This page also contains information about the ClientSettings.xml you can use to lock SVN or perforce parameters to a fixed value.

I hope that helps

-Peter

[angelmcc]

Hi, guys!
I'm looking at this and wondering if I've made the wrong choice to try to use AWS cloud as my server for Articy Multi-user. I'm very IT naive, so I'm fumbling my way through setting this up and getting Articy going.

Do you have any documentation that could help specifically with setting up on an AWS cloud?

Thanks!
Angel...