Daniel Chalef

KnowledgeTree on-demand: KnowledgeTreeLive coming Real Soon Now(tm)

We’re getting very close to unveiling KnowledgeTreeLive, an on-demand KnowledgeTree service built on top of the very scalable and fault-tolerant Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) infrastructure.

In the next few weeks we’ll be bringing customers on to the service: bringing powerful, cost-effective, document management to organizations who would prefer not to run an on-premise application. And the cool part is that there will be very little lock-in: it will be possible to migrate off KnowledgeTreeLive to our free KnowledgeTree Open Source Edition. And you have access to the core product source code!

We won’t be charging an “arm and a leg” for storage either, compared to many of the other software-as-a-service content management providers. Amazon S3 provides us vast amounts of storage at a relatively low cost and we’re providing this to our customers.

Thanks to rPath, our development path has been relatively smooth: we’ve built virtual appliances based on our KnowledgeTree Appliance product and deployed them on the Elastic Compute Cloud. EC2 is a massive Xen virtualization cluster and rPath’s tools allowed us to seamlessly transfer virtual appliances into the EC2 environment.

Jean-Paul Bauer, our systems architect on the project, has built a very nifty scale-out environment for our front-end Apache virtual appliances and a nice back-end MySQL virtual appliance infrastructure that gets around the lack of persistence in the EC2 infrastructure. Our development team, led by Jalal Abrahams, has built a StorageProvider plugin for KnowledgeTree that utilizes S3 as the back-end document storage service.

We’ll be issuing a more formal announcement in a couple of weeks time.