LiveArchive Cloud Considerations: It Works Everywhere!

Over the past month we’ve been holding LiveArchive Workshop Series with clients who want to get LiveArchive deployed and staff trained in under 1 hour. It’s going well and the question we get the most is: “Will it work on Azure/Linode/Oracle/___?!” Yes, it works with ALL public and private clouds because it’s built on top of open source technology standards that everyone offers. In order to deploy LiveArchive you’d follow the same principles and steps outlined in our Cloud Backend Setup at Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, Google Cloud (even if you host it yourself on your own network/hardware). All public clouds offer containerized services and the Docker containers that make up LiveArchive are mariadb:latest, minio/minio:latest, and exchangedefender/livearchive-webmail:latest.

Navigating IT Politics

Now that you know ExchangeDefender LiveArchive works on all the popular cloud providers, it’s time to pick one. Here are 3 things to keep in mind:

1) Your choice will typically be controlled by the clients existing infrastructure and vendor policies – if they are an all Microsoft shop you’ll likely be deploying LiveArchive on Microsoft Azure. Regardless of your choice of cloud vendor, you will still get the same LiveArchive performance and keep in mind that full source code for the entire stack is available here: https://github.com/exchangedefender/livearchive-webmail. Having access to the code gives you the ability to optimize, customize, and future-proof your setup.

2) You will need access to DNS. In order to deploy LiveArchive you will need to create a CNAME for the LiveArchive UI which is required in order to request an SSL certificate.

3) You will need to allow several network policies on your choice of public or private cloud. Specifically, you will need to allow tcp ports 80/443 for the web services and you will need to allow tcp ports 9000/3306 to our LiveArchive network so that we can store your messages and message metadata. Cost is also an important criteria for many organizations so we recommend researching cloud cost calculators

This way you can see who will give you the best bang for the buck currently vs. over time as your organization grows. If you’re trying to keep the costs to a minimum your best option is going to keep minio and MariaDB services self-hosted or on semi-dedicated/VPS/colo deployment and to only put the LiveArchive Web UI in the cloud.

We look forward to seeing you in our workshops, and keep in mind you can get it going in under 10 minutes just by following these steps!