Read-only archive version

[tucny]

Feature idea: Provide a separately-licensed version of the Plastic server for read-only archive purposes.

Reasoning:

• Over time for various companies the number of repositories grows and as projects reach their end-of-life, they become dormant.
• Keeping such repositories in the main Plastic server is not practical — increases backup, maintenance, storage cost (may be rather big if you version large binary files).
• Permission management becomes more complex with tons of outdated repos around.
• Access to the archive may be delegated to just a few users, without any specific per-repo permissions.
• Read-write access is just undesirable at all.
• Archived repositories could be stored on a separate infrastructure with cheap storage, without daily backups (the content is static, in fact, so uploading such repo to e.g. Amazon Glacier is a better option than any regular backups), with low-end SQL configuration.

Possible feature set:

1. Automatically send a repository DB from the primary server to the archival server, and remove from the primary server.
2. Retrieve back an archived repository DB from the archival server to the primary server, and remove from the archival server.
3. Simple per-archival server access rights, without granular permissions. No changes to permission settings inside the archive repositories. The archival server just overrides them.

The license and pricing terms could be based on a one-time fee + annual maintenance for a perpetual license, regardless of the number of users.

[calbzam]

Hi,

Not sure if you know that Plastic supports read-only users by default. If a user license hasn't been activated or deactivated, this user will be able to perform read-only operations and an extra license will not be necessary. Normally this kind of user is configured for building purposes.

Also, I think normally is not necessary to set up a second Plastic server, but if you prefer to do it, migrating the databases or configuring a synchronization view is a straightforward operation. 

Regards,
Carlos.

 

[tucny]

So I can have an separate, unlicensed server installation, which has unactivated and thus read-only users? My goal is to separate the archive from production.

[calbzam]

Well, you would need a license for the server to run, but the read-only operations will not consume an extra license spot. 

Anway, the same users from your production server will be accessing the second server, right? So you can use the same license file. If you need an extra read-only user, you will be able to use it without paying extra for it.

Regards,

Carlos.

[tucny]

Thanks for the suggestion. If I will ever have time, I will give it a try :))