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Getting started

ℹ️ Requires an Organization plan

Anchorpoint never uploads your production files to our cloud server. It only processes metadata. This requires Anchorpoint to communicate with our cloud. If your organization's security requirements do not allow external communication or prohibit storing metadata on external servers, you can host the Anchorpoint server yourself.

How the Anchorpoint cloud server works​

Anchorpoint communicates with a server to exchange metadata and project information. Metadata includes:

  • File locking information
  • Attributes, comments, and images attached to comments (coming soon)
  • Real-time updates and notifications

Project information includes:

  • Workspace information
  • License quotas (but no payment information)
  • Projects
  • Member information (including their email addresses, not login credentials)
  • Project icons

All this information is stored on a server hosted by the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). The corresponding data centers are located in Frankfurt, Germany, with instances running on eu-central-1a, eu-central-1b, and eu-central-1c. This server also communicates with the user authentication system Auth0 for managing login credentials and the payment processing provider Stripe for managing payment information.

The Anchorpoint server never stores production data, which is typically located on a Git server of your choice or a shared folder that is synced through solutions such as your NAS, Dropbox, Google Drive, or similar. Read more about application infrastructure and security in our security brief.

Git servers​

As mentioned above, Anchorpoint does not store production data. If you want to use Anchorpoint with Git, you will need to install a self-hosted Gitea or GitLab instance and configure it properly for Git LFS. Again, our Solutions Architect can help.

Self-hosting the Anchorpoint server​

If you need complete control over your data flow and storage, the Anchorpoint server can also be self-hosted on your own VPC, such as an Amazon EC2 instance, or in your local network. The self-hosted server never talks to our cloud or any of our systems for maximum compliance. If you are on an organization plan that includes the self-hosting option, our team will assist you in setting up this server, support and updates.

Components​

The Anchorpoint Server consists of 6 components, that are bundled in a Docker Compose created by our self-hosting cli tool.

  1. The Anchorpoint Backend as a metadata server, which processes Anchorpoint metadata and interacts directly with the Anchorpoint Desktop Client and the database.
  2. An auth provider (Keycloak) for user authentication. It also enables SSO using providers such as Azure Active Directory.
  3. A reverse proxy (Traefik) to serve different containers over the same ports.
  4. A Message Broker (RabbitMQ)
  5. A database (PostgreSQL) to store the metadata from the Anchorpoint backend and userdata from the auth provider
  6. An object storage (such as AWS S3 or minio) for storing project thumbnails and other binary data

Application Architecture​

The application architecture is similar to the Anchorpoint Cloud Solution. Unlike the cloud solution, the self-hosted server does not send or store data outside of your environment. Nor does it have:

  • A connection to our payment processor
  • A connection to our user identity management system

There are also limitations to the desktop application, which does not have the option to start a self-hosted trial or upgrade plans. However you can request a trial license for the self-hosted server to test the self-hosted environment with the desktop application.

Technical Requirements​

The server can be installed on any system that meets the following requirements:

  • A machine running latest version of Linux distribution (e.g. Ubuntu Server, CentOS, Alpine Linux)
  • Docker-engine version > 23.0.5
  • Docker-compose version > 2.18.0
  • 2 CPU cores and at least 8 GiB RAM
  • 30 GB storage on the server
  • Minimum 80 GB additional disk storage for data
  • (Optional) A user identity management service such as Azure AD or LDAP for SSO authentication.

Specific requirements for cloud setups (e.g. AWS or Azure) are described in the specific setup guides down below.

Other Requirements​

Make sure your firewall supports HTTP2 connections. Anchorpoint uses the gRPC protocol to communicate with the server, which is based on HTTP2. It has a fallback for an HTTP1 gateway, however gRPC improves the speed and effiency of realtime updates to the Anchorpoint client. We highly recommend that you start an Anchorpoint cloud trial to evaluate whether gRPC works in your environment.

Licensing​

Licensing depends on the number of users you will have. Please contact us for a quote. You can also request a free trial license to test the self hosted environment. You will receive a license key that you will need to enter during the installation process.

Setup Guides for different environments​

We provide the following guides:

  1. A general self-hosted server setup guide here
  2. An AWS EC2 instance setup guide here
  3. An Azure VM instance setup guide here

If you want to setup the stack on your own via various services like e.g. Amazon Elastic Container Service (Aws ECS) or other services that support docker containers, please see our example github repository here. It currently contains an example docker-compose stack with all the necessary configuration files described as a starting point for your own setup.