Breezy Overview and Deployment Options

Background

The purpose of this article is to make you basically familiar with how Breezy works, and help you understand what you will need to know in order to administer your particular deployment.

Fundamentally, Breezy consists of three kinds of components:

1. Document Providers, which get print jobs into the system (e.g., mobile apps, the UQueue web upload feature, print@breezy.com, etc.);
2. Infrastructure, which translates users' print jobs into the right format and sends them to the right printers; and
3. The printers themselves.

How Breezy Works

Most of the work Breezy does takes place at the infrastructure level. A general overview of a document's path follows below, with all bolded terms being part of the Breezy infrastructure:

• A Document Provider (e.g., a mobile app) sends an encrypted document to a Buffer.
• The Rendering Engine downloads the document from the Buffer, renders the document for printing, and returns the rendered document to the Buffer.
• If appropriate, a Processing Engine sends the document to an "external" print provider such as FedEx Office.
• Assuming the document was not passed to a third party by the Processing Engine, the Connector downloads from the Buffer and sends it to the printer.
• During the whole process, the Controller uses a Queuing Service to maintain order among all the different parts of the system.

Deployment Models

Breezy offers three different deployment models to choose from.

Customers who just want to get up and running as fast as possible and with a minimum of investment can choose a Cloud deployment, and be printing in minutes. In this model, documents are rendered securely using Breezy's Isolated Rendering Cluster, and only the Connector needs to be installed locally. This is the least expensive and the fastest way to get started.

Customers who for internal compliance or other security reasons generally prefer to avoid the cloud can choose a Hybrid deployment.  This will take up to a few hours to configure, but users' documents will never transit the cloud in any way. Documents are rendered and stored entirely on-premise, and the cloud is used only for management and reporting.

And finally, customers who want 100% control of the entire system and do not want anything ever to contact the cloud for any reason can choose an On-Premise deployment, and host all of Breezy's infrastructure internally.

More detail on each of these models follows below.

Cloud

Infrastructure required: Connector

Step by Step Installation Guide: Breezy Installation: Cloud Deployment

Architecture Diagram:

 

Hybrid

Infrastructure required:

• Connector
• Rendering Engine
• Buffer (Optional)
• Processing Engine (Optional)

Step by Step Installation Guide: Breezy Installation: Hybrid Deployment

Architecture Diagram:

 

On-Premise

Infrastructure required: Everything:

• Connector
• Rendering Engine
• Buffer
• Processing Engine (Optional)
• Queuing Service
• Controller

Step by Step Installation Guide: Breezy Installation: Fully On-Premise Deployment

Architecture Diagram:

 

 

Summary

Whichever deployment model you choose, the links above should help you prepare for a successful deployment. Of course, should you have any questions, we hope you'll feel free to contact support at any time. We're here to help!