Hosting on AWS with External Authentication

[GEORGL03]

Good afternoon everyone,

 

Some BackStory:

When FMCloud was first announced, I was ecstatic; I'm all for moving towards cloud technology for my agency. I was nearly there...about to pull the trigger and start a migration scheme from my current setup into the FMCloud, but then the one big caveat was found..

"Supports custom app authentication via FileMaker user accounts only" AKA no External Authentication. But that is fine, I understand it was released for small businesses which need the scalability of AWS, but this DOES NOT work for my agency. I spent half a year moving away from filemaker user accounts, I can't go back; plus they have a Single Sign-on initiative that I'm trying to meet.

 

But I still need to get off of my old physical towers.So my next idea is that I want to spin up an EC2 in AWS and put filemaker server on it as an alternative, but I can't find any verbiage that details how that works(or if it works) in the way that I would like. Namely, I need my AWS server to talk to Active Directory, preferably by ADFS or SAML (lesser so).

 

So the question:

Can I setup external Authentication to an Active Directory from a server being hosted on AWS that is housing FileMaker Server 15? If so, What should I make note of before diving into this?

 

Thanks for any help and clarification someone can provide.

 

~Levi

[Wim Decorte]

You may enjoy Azure more than AWS in this respect since it's microsoft and has a smoother integration between on-premise and cloud ADs.

Your FMS can not talk directly to your on-premise AD except if you can find a way to make the AWS machine a member server in your domain. You can't make FMS EA work through ADFS or SAML.

You could spin up a Windows AD instance on AWS and join that one and the FMS box into one domain and then set up a trust relationship (if possible - I have not checked) between that and your on-premise domain.  Or set up a sync between the two ADs.

[Claus Lavendt]

While I am not an Active Directory expert, I know that with Open Directory it is possibly to setup a replica server.

That will automatically take care of sync between the Directory master and the replica.

This way you should be able to have your replica on your AWS server, which replica data from your on-premises AD.