This is an update on our progress toward a new reference deployment of Alfresco Content Services based on Docker containers.
Customer Research
Our larger customers broadly appear to be adopting Docker and Kubernetes, and our Certified Partners have expressed enthusiasm about moving in that direction. But we were unsure if these technologies were seeing similar adoption by our smaller customers. We sent a survey to about 500 of our smaller customers asking them how they deploy enterprise software. About 10% responded (another 10% of those invited to participate were out-of-office for the end-of-year holidays). These are the highlights:
- How do you usually install Alfresco products for production?
- Executable installer: 50%
- Manual setup from a zip file: 25%
- 3rd party deployment tool: 10%
- Build from source: 4%
- AWS QuickStart: 0% (this is very surprising, as it is widely used by our larger customers)
- Other: 11%
- "How do you usually install enterprise software?" (select all that apply)
- GUI installer: 60%
- Command line scripts: 50%
- A package repository: 33%
- Manual setup from a zip file: 29%
- Container deployments: 17%
- Maven scripts: 6%
- 50% of survey respondents consider themselves familiar with container technology (3 or above on a 5 point scale)
- Rate your likelihood of adopting the following technologies in the next 12 months:
- In 12 months, 78% of survey respondents expect to host Alfresco products on-premise, and 12% expect to host on AWS.
- How would you use a container or virtual machine delivered by a vendor of an enterprise application?
This survey shows us that GUI experiences are more popular with our smaller customers than we expected, and the current installers are more widely used than we previously appreciated. We also see that though many of our customers are not yet prepared to adopt container technologies, many are already favorable and nearly two-thirds of these organizations say they would benefit from a containerized reference deployment to either use directly or to use in setting up their own installations. Though we didn't specifically ask the question, some respondents mentioned that their Alfresco deployments are maintained by 3rd parties such as Alfresco Certified Partners, which reduces the learning needed by customers.
Based on this survey, and feedback from our larger customers and partners, we feel that a containerized deployment provides the most value for our customer base. But we recognize that we need to make adoption as easy as possible for organizations that are not currently familiar with these technologies. We will seek additional feedback from these smaller customers to ensure that any solution we deliver can be widely adopted.
Progress Made
In addition to learning more about our customer's deployment preferences, we have made significant progress in delivering a new way to deploy Alfresco products.
Feel free to ask questions or provide feedback on this page.
