Master Thesis MSTR-2020-44

BibliographyShao, Gang: About the design changes required for enabling ECM systems to exploit cloud technology.
University of Stuttgart, Faculty of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, and Information Technology, Master Thesis No. 44 (2020).
56 pages, english.
Abstract

Since the late 1980s, Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECM systems) have been used to store, manage, distribute all kinds of documents, media content, and information in enterprises. ECM systems also enable enterprises to integrate their business processes with contents, employing corporate information lifecycle and governance as well as automation of contents processing. The ever-changing business models and increasing demands have pushed ECM systems to evolve into a very active content repository with expectations such as high availability, high scalability, high customizability. These expectations soon became a costly financial burden for enterprises. The on-going hype around cloud computing has raised attention with its claims on improved manageability, less maintenance, and cost-effectiveness. Embracing the cloud might be a good solution for the next high-performance ECM system at an affordable price. To achieve such a goal, the designs of ECM systems must be changed before deployment into the cloud. Thus, this thesis aims to analyze the architecture design of legacy ECM systems, determine its shortcomings, and propose design changes required for embracing cloud technologies. The main proposal to design changes are i) decomposing an ECM system to its constituent components, ii) containerizing those components and create standard images, iii) decoupling the physical link between the data storage device from the applications container by utilizing docker volumes in dedicated persistent data containers instead, iv) utilizing software-defined network infrastructure where possible. These design changes then were tested with a proof-of-concept prototype, where an ECM product was successfully deployed and tested using Docker in a cloud environment backed by OpenStack.

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Department(s)University of Stuttgart, Institute of Parallel and Distributed Systems, Applications of Parallel and Distributed Systems
Superviser(s)Mitschang, Prof. Bernhard; Mega, Cataldo
Entry dateMarch 3, 2021
   Publ. Computer Science