Cloud-based Hosting Announcements

One of the major goals of the current phase of Avalon, supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is evolving Avalon to include a hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) option in order to help grow the Avalon user base.

The Avalon team is excited to announce 3 recent steps made towards cloud-based, hosted solutions:

1)   The Avalon team has successfully completed a number of necessary upgrades towards cloud based services.

Our team has a proof-of-concept implementation Avalon 5.1 running Amazon Web Services (AWS), taking advantage of AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Transcoder and CloudFront Streaming.

As of the upcoming Avalon 6.0 release (currently available in an Alpha test version), Avalon runs on Fedora 4.  This includes new data models, an update to Hydra 10 and Solr and Ruby upgrades.

2)    The Avalon team is partnering with Lyrasis and DuraSpace to explore a SaaS offering of Avalon by Lyrasis that would leverage DuraCloud for preservation storage. 

Our first step is to gauge interest in such a service as well as to identify potential pilot participants. To help us with this assessment, we would appreciate it if you could fill out the following survey:  http://bit.ly/2dLTVrh

3)   Data Curation Experts has announced that they will offer hosted Avalon as a service beginning in January 2017.

This offering includes installation, setup and support of an Avalon instance in AWS for institutions who may not have the infrastructure or staff to spin up their own instance of Avalon or may want to start with Avalon in the cloud and eventually move it in house.