Cloud Platform Configuration

Alegion can allow the customer to host their assets within a supported cloud platform, but still utilize Alegion platform business logic for granting asset read access to authorized workers. There are two primary benefits to managing assets in this manner.

• Security
  • Only an authorized worker gets access to view the asset, and only while performing annotation work on that asset.
• Self-Hosted
  • The customer hosts the assets, not Alegion. Alegion never sees the asset bytes, only asset metadata like filename, frames-per-second, number of frames, etc.

Supported Platforms

Alegion currently supports both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Click either icon to be directed to specific instructions on how to provide Alegion with the necessary information to configure a connection between Alegion and your data properly. If your assets are stored in an unsupported cloud platform, or hosted in a proprietary environment, please see the following resource: Individually Hosted Assets & Unsupported Cloud Platforms.

Asset Access for Annotation Worker

In a nutshell, the customer hosts their assets in a bucket within their own cloud platform account. The Alegion platform uses a signed URL to grant an authorized worker secure, limited-time access to a specific asset, while the worker is annotating that asset. When the customer is hosting assets in their own bucket, they simply need to grant permission to read that bucket to Alegion. The Alegion platform is then able to generate valid signed URLs for assets in the customer’s bucket, which are passed to authorized workers.

Setup Diagram

 

Process Flow Diagram

Automated Image Asset Registration

Depending on the desired workflow, we can also set up automated asset registration on the customer’s bucket. This involves creating an Event Trigger on the bucket which notifies Alegion’s AWS account every time a new asset is added to the customer bucket. The notification then calls the Alegion API to register (but not upload) that asset. This alleviates the need for the customer to write and run their own code to call the asset registration API, or use an out-of-band method for registration.

Automated Video Asset Validation and Registration

The Alegion platform requires more metadata about video assets than image assets. Specifically, it needs frames-per-second and frame count. Therefore, to implement the same style of automated registration for videos as was described for images, the Lambda needs read access to the bucket in order to analyze the assets at registration time. In this setup, the asset bytes are still never stored on the Alegion side, and the Lambda only accesses the bytes for the duration of the analysis. We have created a tool that performs the necessary analysis and also validates that the video file doesn’t have any known issues that would cause a problem when displayed to the worker in the annotation tool.