Delivering Document Conversion as a Cloud Service with High Throughput and Responsiveness

Document understanding is a key business process in the data-driven economy since documents are central to knowledge discovery and business insights. Converting documents into a machine-processable format is a particular challenge here due to their huge variability in formats and complex structure. Accordingly, many algorithms and machine-learning methods emerged to solve particular tasks such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), layout analysis, table-structure recovery, figure understanding, etc. We observe the adoption of such methods in document understanding solutions offered by all major cloud providers. Yet, publications outlining how such services are designed and optimized to scale in the cloud are scarce.