VERBI GmbH is the software provider of MAXQDA, a software to support academic, scientific and business institutions in their daily research with worldwide distributed teams.
To support the team work of their customers, VERBI developed with MAXQDA TeamCloud a cloud strategy for a frictionless collaborate work on common research tasks between members of the research teams.
This strategy shall be developed entirely in the public cloud. VERBI chose YOTRON as their consultant to introduce the public cloud into their strategy because of our experience in Cloud topics.
We are delighted that we could help VERBI on their way into the cloud and to make the project a success.
Concept development of the workflows
We provided concepts how to integrate the Cloud into MAXQDA as frictionless as possible. Main concepts are:
- data management of the research files of MAXQDA in a process cycle (Short concept)
- authorization of the users of TeamCloud from the registration to the authentication
- development of TeamCloud itself
- monitoring of TeamCloud
- highly secure all processes
- introduce FinOps principles to monitor and explain the costs raised by the cloud resources
AWS as the public cloud provider
We recommended AWS as their choice for a public cloud provider because of the worldwide approach and the wide range of fully-managed services available in AWS. This allows to run a big architecture 24/7 with a minimum of staff.
Our main recommendations are:
- Cloud only strategy in AWS
- Usage of fully-managed services
- Usage of serverless infrastructure as much as possible
- All is Infrastructure as Code
- Usage of Cloud services for the development of TeamCloud itself
Infrastructure as Code (Iac)
IaC was base of the development from the beginning. No manual processes within AWS are needed to run or update the infrastructure.
VERBI is now using IaC for
- the environment to provide TeamCloud
- the environment to develop TeamCloud itself
- the setup of the authorization (IAM) for the users of TeamCloud
AWS-Services with S3, DynamoDB, Lambda and ApiGateway
Based of our recommendation highly secure and fully-managed services of AWS are used mainly. The setup contains the services
- S3
- DynamoDB
- Lambda and ApiGateway
- AWS-Cognito
- IAM
- CloudWatch for Monitoring
- …
AWS-SDK for Web and C++
We supported VERBI in using the SDKs of AWS for the new web-based application TeamCloud and their own desktop-based software MAXQDA which is developed in C++. We supported the software developer to implement and to use the SDK in context with the AWS services.
The development environment with CodeArtifact
For the development of TeamCloud the developer used fully-managed services of AWS-CodeArtifact for their development tasks
- CodeCommit as the fully managed source control service based on Git and
- CodePipeline as the CI/CD platform
Links
- MAXQDA TeamCloud
- Short concept of MAXQDA TeamCloud
- A short video of the concept and the usage of MAXQDA TeamCloud
- A 49 minutes long webinar with an introduction of MAXQDA TeamCloud
