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Our company have been using perforce hosted on WMWare. It works fine for Local (US) developers but the team oversea is complaining about its performance. Migration to the cloud may resolve the problem. What could be cons of that move?

Val K
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  • I moved the question from StackОverflow per request of one of your Pharisees. Please advice what is the Proper place for this question. – Val K Feb 19 '16 at 20:21

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Why do you think hosting externally will make a difference? If if's a reasonably fast machine with a good network connection it should perform similarly to running on AWS, unless you put it in a data center between your users.

What's causing the slow down? Is the CPU limiting? Network bandwidth saturated, or not enough bandwidth? Network latency? Problems in the local network of the remote developers?

You could use Perforce Replication to have a second server on their network, which can stay in sync with the main server. This introduces a small risk that simultaneous checkins in both location, but Perforce may have something in place to mitigate that.

In general moving the cloud is going to cost you more, increase latency and performance for local users, and you need to consider security. AWS is secure, unless you make your VM insecure through poor configuration. You also need to consider availability (hosting in two AZs), backups (EBS is not as reliable as S3), and probably a bunch of other factors. In general though it should work fine, just have someone who has AWS experience set it up, ideally someone with AWS architect certification.

Tim
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  • The hope to make a difference is based on the following promise from AWS **High Availability Through Multiple Availability Zones** **In addition to replicating applications and data across multiple data centers** in the same Region using Availability Zones, you can also choose to increase redundancy and fault tolerance further by replicating data between geographic Regions. You can do so using both private, high speed networking and public internet connections to provide an additional layer of business continuity, or to provide low latency access across the globe. – Val K Feb 10 '16 at 23:57
  • I thought about Perforce Replication but my predecessor was not able to make it works reliable enough. Always something wrong. – Val K Feb 10 '16 at 23:59
  • AWS cost is another big thing. Since it is not known well enough. If somebody can share the statistic when running source control on AWS then it could be a big help. – Val K Feb 11 '16 at 00:03
  • This probably isn't something for SO, you need to think about it and probably hire someone qualified to help you with this. Yes, you can easily run any version control system on AWS. Yes there are risks, in terms of security of the system and needing backups. Yes it will cost you something, you'll have to look into instance sizes (t2 instances), EBS disk use, snapshot cost for EBS backups, bandwidth, but probably not a massive amount. But if you set it up without proper consideration you could make things worse for everyone. – Tim Feb 11 '16 at 00:06
  • Perforce Replication is unidrectional, and replica servers are intended for read-only purposes. **Bidirectional replication is not supported by Perforce** – Val K Feb 19 '16 at 20:15