What is Capture as a Service?
Software as a service (SaaS) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. It is sometimes referred to as "on-demand software".
recoflo provides document capture (OCR, classification, extraction, archiving) as a SaaS or simply Capture as a Service (CaaS).
Low workload - few containers running
Higher workload - more containers are started automatically
Peak workload - more containers and virtual machines are started
The importance of cloud-native processing
Many companies tried to move their traditional software into the cloud. Though, very few if any are successful. How does recoflo's approach differ from this?
First and foremost recoflo has been designed from ground up to be a cloud-native application. A cloud offers various features such as clustering of containers, auto-scaling and service-discovery. A traditional legacy software that may have it's roots in the 90s can't be retrofitted easily to make use of these features.
Auto-scaling container services
All recoflo components run in Docker containers as part of a cluster (Amazon ECS, Kubernetes) as a so-called container-service. Now we can put each container-service in a auto-scaling group. This means we can start more containers if the workload is high to fulfill the required SLAs. We also can stop containers on lower workloads to avoid unneccessary costs.
Legacy software that runs in the cloud has to make trade-offs when it comes to scalability. Either the setup contains too few servers and the throughput slows is limited at peak loads. Or the setup can cope with peak loads but has many machines idling on average or low workload which increases the price/page unneccessarily.
Only a smart cloud-native solution like recoflo has a setup that utilizes the data center capacity in an optimal way. Not only can we provide a better service for any workload pattern but we can also offer this for a very attractive price.
Automatic upgrades - zero downtimes
Another advantage of recoflo's container-strategy is that we can do upgrades without disrupting the business. While a service keeps processing with the previous version of your solution we will start new containers with the next version until eventually all containers run on the latest version. This happens without any downtime. We do this for each component individually - our core service, any out-of-the-box solution or a custom solution.