Appspace has long adopted a cloud-first strategy to make managing and sharing content as easy as possible with improved user experience. Appspace cloud is a scalable platform with agility and responsiveness, quick deployment speed and technologies, enhanced support, and a dedicated cloud operations team that manages the environment 24×7. Our cloud infrastructure is built with the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) with data cluster locations available in all major regions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.
Appspace provides cloud, private cloud, and on-prem deployments. Our standardized and fully managed cloud deployment solution ensures customers reap the benefits of always being on the latest build of Appspace with access to all the latest features, without the additional concerns of hosting and maintaining a server. Most importantly, cloud exceeds the cost-effectiveness of a virtualized or physical infrastructure through higher workload density and greater resource utilization.
The private cloud is perfect for customers who require hosting tenancy and homing to a certain region. Customers with a private cloud can benefit with multi-tenant environments to provide internal brands/customers an isolated and secure environment using separate multi-tenant accounts from one private cloud instance.
What’s in this article:
Cloud Architecture
The Appspace cloud infrastructure includes a content distribution network to intelligently distribute content globally, covering all major regions for data tenancy. Content is only hosted in the areas where it is being used, providing data tenancy in areas where the Appspace account is provisioned for speedy delivery and network efficiency.
In a default deployment scenario, every device with an Appspace application communicates with Appspace cloud servers directly and downloads its own copy of content or streams content using secure HTTPS web protocols (Port 443).
Customers who choose to use a reverse proxy will benefit from additional content caching and efficiency.
Data Compliance, Backup, & Security
Appspace’s partnership with Google Cloud for geographical-specific deployment options, also allows us to enable a robust failover system. We perform fully encrypted database and content backups at a minimum of every four hours and retain these backups for no less than three months. Offsite backup storage sites are geographically redundant from those where the active account resides.
All backup data is encrypted. We have implemented TLS1.2 and higher, to support 256-bit and higher private key encryption, adding further data protection.
Appspace credentials are stored on a one-way hash within the Appspace database on the Appspace server. Customers can integrate Active Directory or SAML 2.0 IdP if desired. Appspace Cloud Operations personnel alone have 2FA access to production environments, but if using SAML 2.0 IdP integration, then no credentials are handled by Appspace, rather by the customer’s IdP. Additionally, Appspace supports any SAML 2.0 compliant identity provider for SSO authentication.
For datacenter security and compliance refer to: https://cloud.google.com/security/
For Appspace privacy and SLA, refer to: https://www.appspace.com/legal/
Platform Release Deployment Schedule
Appspace ascribes to the Agile/Scrum development framework, thus we are able to schedule and deploy releases as necessary. Our release schedules are published to allow customers to prepare for the latest features. Upgrades normally take 30 minutes and involve minimal or no downtime.
Public Cloud
The following is the release management schedule for Public Cloud:
- Scheduled feature updates, bug fixes, and escalation fixes are typically scheduled at 8:00 PM CST time throughout the week, typically on a Friday evening.
- Critical fixes including security patches or emergency updates to support reliability and availability, will be deployed as necessary.
Private Cloud
For Private Cloud, we offer two release management schedules, based on the customer’s selection:
- Weekly schedule: the Private Cloud is updated weekly on Tuesday with the version that was active in the Public Cloud on the previous Friday (one week behind the Public Cloud).
- Monthly schedule: the Private Cloud is updated monthly on the first Tuesday with the version that was active in the weekly updated Private Clouds one month prior (generally five weeks behind the Public Cloud).
Private Cloud servers are updated at 11 pm local time, based on the time zone of the server’s physical data center location, as follows:
- US-Central (Iowa) – TUE 11 PM CT
- EU-West (Belgium) – TUE 11 PM CET
- Asia-SE (Singapore) – TUE 11 PM SST
- AUS-SE (Sydney) – TUE 11 PM AET
On-Prem
On-prem deployment builds are compiled from accumulated Public Cloud releases and made available to paying customers periodically to match feature offerings with Appspace Public Cloud.
For supported on-prem versions, refer to https://docs.appspace.com/latest/platform/on-prem-upgrade-paths/
Notification Subscription
Customers can subscribe to notifications for scheduled upgrades at https://status.appspace.com/