Scale, Speed, being Current and Automation are the driving forces behind the evolution of the Affino 7 cloud architecture.
The major catalyst for the upgraded Affino Cloud Architecture is ColdFusion 10. Affino has a long history as a ColdFusion application, dating back to the original ColdFusion Beta from Allaire.
ColdFusion has come a long way since then, and it is now primarily a RAD application platform built on top of Java. In practice we increasingly code directly to Java where required / beneficial.
It is not a ‘sexy’ platform in that it is commercial rather than open source, it is however an excellent platform for developing web applications, and Adobe has done a great job with the latest release.
In practice many / most of the advantages for Affino in the move to CF10 revolve around it’s tighter integration with Java. Key CF improvements are tighter Adobe and Microsoft platform / document integrations.
The Java Server evolution for ColdFusion to Tomcat is a big step forward for Affino, and after our initial trials it is clear to us that we need to take the next step and shift to Apache from IIS as well.
We see a lot of benefits coming in terms of automation and scaling from the move to Tomcat / Apache for Affino.
We’re going to be able to make big code stack changes with the new native RESTful and HTML 5 capabilities of the ColdFusion platform.
It means clearing out a considerable amount of proprietary code and replacing it with native calls. Something that we’re already well underway with.
We envisage using Solr as a core search technology in Affino 7, to drive up scale, accuracy and performance significantly.
We will continue using ImageMagick for media processing as we simply can’t find anything which delivers better performance.
We are sticking with Microsoft servers for the time-being both for the application and database servers. They have served us very well, however it is going to be critical that we can automate more aspects, and either Microsoft will need to deliver on these or we will review these in the future as well.
Underlying everything now are Amazon cloud services. We rely on these heavily for resilience, speed of deployment, scalability and global distribution.
Amazon continues to evolve its cloud platform and every month sees further key improvements which we rapidly embrace to further improve Affino’s great delivery.
Affino benefits greatly from working with some great frameworks / components including: JQuery / JQuery UI / JCarousel, Highcharts, and TinyMCE. There is no change to this for Affino 7, beyond embracing the latest versions.
Security / Load Balancing / Distribution / Notifications
Most of the other Affino cloud elements are tightly involved in security, distribution, scaling, intrusion prevention and backups.
Let us know if you have any thoughts / questions about the changes.
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