Participant

Question

InDesign Server: Help for multi-tenant architecture

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
February 19, 2025
5 replies
451 views

Hi All,

I need some help in designing a good and reliable multi-tenant InDesign Server architecture:

We run a multi-tenant infrastructure with multiple Digital Asset Management instances. No we'd like to add InDesign File processing with this features:

* Preview creation (small, medium, large) of the first 300 pages

* full text analysis including frame positions (so what text is where on what page)

* link analysis including frame positions (so what image / linked ressources is where on what page)

Today we have an InDesign Plugin that does all that already. No we d like to do this without user interaction automated in the cloud.

Technical situation:

Each tenant has ist own logical volume in a Ceph based file storage cluster. Each tenant is aware of when what file changes, so we can trigger preview generation if a new file appears of something changes.

Questions we have:

1) What is the best and most reliable OS to run the InDesign Server on

2) Can the InDesing Server reliably run in a virtualized Environment? VMWare or better Proxmox?

3) Is the InDesign Servce License "Premium" the license to go for? Is it limited in terms of parallel server executions?

4) Any good / best practices on how to dynamicly mount the file volumes on the indesign server?

5) is dynamically mounting volumes the right approach as we do not know which links are in the InDesign Document so we have to mount the whole volume

6) Any suggestions for me when planning or processing this?

Many thanks for your ideas!

Robert at ID-Tasker

Legend

@daniel.luecke

I think your life would be WAY easier - if you go for a scripting solution - especially one, that can interact with InDesign from "outside", it would also be able to prepare the environment for each InDesign's instance - before it's run.

D

Dirk Becker

Legend

Sounds like you're planning an Archive rather than generic DAM.

In comparable scenarios that I've seen, ongoing optimization of issues like image data access were the task of a dedicated team of administrators with focus on their hosting platforms. "Best" also fluctuates with system versions, hardware changes, network changes, application versions e.g. the InDesign team fighting locking problems, and usage patterns.

Some file systems were better for static large files such as images, others were better for log files, even others for configuration and scripts, or temporary working files.

Regarding the plugin - if user interaction is the problem, ask the developer to work around that, unless you have other reasons. Traditional plug-ins (rather than scripted plugins) should already be split between model/functionality and UI anyway. E.g. I have a set of plugins which started with tons of UI mirroring the otherwise web based DAM, down to article structure predating InDesign's. This has gone thru several DAM system generations, supported at least 3 different editorial systems and it is still feeding the accounting system from a server based version along the current web centric "cloud" fashion.

Regarding the license - you'd choose it by the price tag, as long your architecture complies with the license limitations. Alternatively your purchase department talks to their contacts at Adobe.

Suggestions for your volume problem: decouple, the link subsystem of InDesign is extensible.

leo.r

Community Expert

4) Any good / best practices on how to dynamicly mount the file volumes on the indesign server?

5) is dynamically mounting volumes the right approach as we do not know which links are in the InDesign Document so we have to mount the whole volume

By @daniel.luecke

If you do want to mount volumes dynamically, then you'll need a custom script/plug-in that will analyze each document's links and mount the required volumes if needed. Whether this approach is right or wrong depends on many specifics of your workflow and setup, so only you and your team can make the appropriate decision. If you always keep your required volumes mounted, then you don't need any extra steps to mount them.

D

daniel.lueckeAuthor

Participant

Hi @leo.r ,

the challenge of mounting comes into the game when the previews for tenant A are all processed and now the previews for tenant B should be processed. Then we would mount a volume that is unique per tenant, but for each tenant there is just one specific mount folder (to make sure all the links are valid). So my question regarding mounting is more about: did someone do this already or did someone experience a behaviour with the InDesing Server that will result in problems when the mount is gone and will appear again. I m thinking about caching issues, delays, indexing tasks, etc...

With the question 5) if mounting is a good aproach I want to ask for maybe better solutions like API Calls where all assets linked in the document are provided (pre chosen by the script calling the API) as one option I could think about.

As we are quite good in scaling and multi-tenant environments we only have little experience with the InDesign server and all problems that could come with it. This is why I m asking here for sharing feedback & experience to not run into stupid and IDS specific issues that we could have sorted out before.

Regards,

Daniel

E

Eugene Tyson

Community Expert

Hi

Can honestly say I have no idea - but maybe
@Vivek12 or @HARSHIKA_VERMA

Could help here?

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.