Accelerate your time-to-value, scalability, and innovation with censhare Cloud
On the 18th of January 2024 we have finally launched our cloud-based offering, powered by all the features and functionalities of censhare Classic, enhanced with increased scalability and a completely new developer and admin experience. Our new cloud offering addresses customer and market expectations with new features, low-code capabilities, and a simplified development lifecycle.
In our first Cloud release, we focused on cloud-native development and administration capabilities that make customization, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting faster and easier. For customization and configuration, we introduced low-code orchestration, Git integration and improved user management. For monitoring and troubleshooting, you can integrate with observability tools, straight out-of-the-box. This all boils down to faster innovation and time-to-value with the new features requested by your business.
New release model
Also great news for our customers, that with censhare Cloud, we are gradually moving towards Continuous Delivery, and a Release on Demand model. With this new approach, we'll deliver updates immediately or incrementally according to customer needs. This means that you’ll benefit from frequent updates throughout the year, on top of the regular releases. These releases will not impact your operations, since they require no planned downtime.
New features
Hosting: censhare Cloud is operated in censhare’s own data center, located in Germany. censhare takes care of many DevOps and SecOps responsibilities, automatically scales according to your needs, and provides industry-grade uptime SLA.
censhare Cockpit: An admin space that provides convenient access to all components and system features, including the censhare web client, access management, developer tools, and more.
Business logic orchestration: A low-code orchestration feature, which allows users to implement and customize new workflows easily using a visual interface. A library of reuseable components and integrations is included to get you started quickly.
Monitoring Dashboard: We provide an out-of-the-box integration with Grafana and Prometheus. They deliver real time metrics and customizable graphs, allowing you to gain insights into your performance. This helps you to keep an eye on system metrics, performance indicators and health parameters.
Git integration: This empowers users with efficient version control, streamlined collaboration, traceability of changes, and enhanced code reusability. Git also enables you to automate your deployments through CI/CD pipelines.
censhare Application Server Customization with Git: The censhare Server is now customizable and reproducible through the standard approach via Git integration. It enables developers to be able manage and customize censhare Server Application while maintaining version control and collaboration among your development team.
User management: We have enhanced our Identity and Access Management through Keycloak by providing SSO (Single Sign On) to access multiple applications and services without needing to re-enter credentials. On top of that, administrators now have full access to user and role management.
Troubleshooting Tools: We provide out-of-the-box integrations with Kibana and Jaeger so you can list and access censhare logs and traces. Finding errors, identifying the source of issues, and troubleshooting them becomes much quicker and easier.
Integrated Configuration Management: Allows you to manage your storage account and to add your own service parameters.
Cloud security: censhare Cloud was built with security in mind from the ground up. We improved general user and access management in this release.
Identity and Access Management (IAM) is provided via Keycloak.
Access Control: No access without authentication and authorization
Tenant isolation: A tenant has only access to the own tools, services, and solution space.
Asset management: censhare Cloud provides an interface for asset management and related tasks. A central API gateway provides access to all asset management related services. Hotfolders allow to upload or download files. Automatic message creations allows to automatically react on uploaded files, for example, create an asset from the uploaded file.
censhare Cloud also integrates the censhare Server. The censhare Server hosts all asset-related data. A conversion of your existing censhare Server data is not necessary of that.
Business Automation: As the censhare Server itself also censhare Cloud provides business automation. There is a central messaging hub provided by Kafka. You can use Kafka messages to trigger automatic execution of business logic, for example, custom functions or business workflows.
The censhare Server integrates with Kafka. You can configure the censhare Server to send certain asset events to Kafka that occur on the censhare Server. This then allows custom functions or business flow to react on these messages.
Custom functions using Knative: Custom functions are one way to implement business logic for a custom solution. censhare Cloud uses Knative to serve custom functions.
censhare Cloud especially supports Java as programming language for custom functions. There are censhare Java libraries to access Asset Management functionality. For a faster Cloud development, censhare Cloud supports Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.
The integration of git allows development workflows. This also allows to automatically deploy custom functions to the solution space of the respective tenant. censhare Cloud also provides a central configuration management for custom functions.
We hope that you are as excited as we are to see all the improvements that censhare Cloud brings. In case you are not ready for a transitioning, don't worry. Existing customers can continue using censhare Classic, which will receive regular updates as usual. In case you wish to benefit from the censhare Cloud offering you will receive full support to switch. In addition, in case you are looking into evaluating censhare Cloud, you will have the option to use a bridging option, a solution that allows you to connect your current system with censhare cloud.