Regional Artifact Storage
As a hosted Mender Enterprise customer you can now choose the location for storing device software, also known as Mender Artifacts. If your devices are located mostly in one region of the world, for example Germany, you can choose a Mender Artifact storage location close to this region. This will ensure faster and more reliable software updates installed to your connected devices.
It will also address compliance, and privacy issues where keeping software local is important. You can even use your own Artifact storage service, from an existing cloud service provider account you have, for increased control and security.
The hosted Mender application server will still run from the US-east region, however the device software updates will be stored only in the selected region.
Selecting an Artifact Region may come at an extra service cost due to increased infrastructure costs, depending on desired region and setup.
This feature can be configured on the Organization (aka. Tenant) level in hosted Mender by the hosted Mender team. If you are interested in learning more or enabling it, please reach out to contact@mender.io.
Support for AWS S3 Transfer Acceleration
While a Local Artifact storage is useful if your connected devices are mostly located in one region of the world, it does not help much with widely distributed global deployments because regardless of which region you select, some devices will be in far proximity to the Artifact storage.
To address this issue for worldwide device fleets, hosted Mender now also supports S3 Transfer Acceleration. This feature optimizes the data transfer to/from an S3 bucket worldwide leveraging the AWS edge locations. This is not a CDN by itself, but it makes downloads of artifacts from devices across the globe faster because it is optimizing the network path from the device to the closest access point to the AWS backbone network.
S3 Transfer Acceleration works regardless of where the Artifact storage is located and ensures the transfer is carried out at high speed, worldwide. You can also combine these two features, to select where your Artifact storage will be located while still accelerating the transfer worldwide.
Transfer Acceleration comes at an extra service cost due to increased infrastructure costs.
To learn more about this feature or enable it for your hosted Mender Enterprise account, please reach out to contact@mender.io.
