However, moving a solution originally built for deployment on a monolithic server architecture to the cloud presented challenges. “The way the software was written at first made it difficult to take advantage of the elasticity of cloud storage,” says Luke Adams, chief technology officer at Digital ReLab.

Then the company discovered Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS). When mounted on Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon EFS provides a standard file-system interface and access semantics, allowing organizations to seamlessly integrate it with existing applications and tools. Multiple Amazon EC2 instances can access an Amazon EFS file system simultaneously, so Amazon EFS can provide a common data source for workloads and applications running on more than one Amazon EC2 instance.

“Amazon EFS presents itself as a traditional network file system, so we can use one codebase for our on-premises and cloud offerings,” says Adams. “That saved us about six months of development time, enabling us to onboard clients into the AWS Cloud faster. At the same time, we get the scalability, elasticity, and flexibility of cloud storage.” Amazon EFS is also used as a web file server for latency-optimized processes and as a high-performing workspace for asynchronous and ephemeral tasks. Because it scales automatically, the company no longer has to overprovision Amazon EC2 volumes, reducing total cost of ownership by approximately 40 percent.

Using Amazon EFS enables Digital ReLab to distribute work-order logic across servers and use Auto Scaling groups to manage large transcoding jobs—all without having to re-architect the platform. Starchive can act as a unified, browser-based front end across on-premises and cloud storage. “We are storage-agnostic, so whether files are on a local drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox, or anywhere else, clients can access and manage them all through one interface,” says Adams.

Using AWS allows the company’s DevOps team to spend less time and effort on management tasks. “Amazon EFS is elastic, so we don’t have to provision new storage for cloud-based clients, which saves DevOps cycles compared to managing static volumes,” says John Leimgruber, senior engineer at Digital ReLab.

In addition, using Amazon EFS has streamlined the company’s ability to release software. Adams says, “We have a single-tenant architecture on most of our stack, so each client has its own instance of the application. Since they are all backed by a single Amazon EFS instance, it’s much easier to deploy new versions or stand up new clients.”

The team is also able to experiment with new services more rapidly. As more Digital ReLab clients move to the cloud, the organization can adapt at a pace that makes sense for its business. “With Amazon EFS, we can replace legacy services one by one, adding new architecture when appropriate,” says Adams.

Casey adds, “Amazon EFS enables us to be more experimental. We’re working on containerization and serverless approaches, yet we can still reuse our standard ability to mount the file system and access assets in a common way. That lets us combine the latest computing techniques with a standard DevOps experience.” As the digital content explosion continues, Digital ReLab’s commitment to openness and innovation will help artists, archivists, and media companies get more from their assets by continually improving how they organize, monetize, and deliver digital content.