farmerswife cloud hosting

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Service
• Architecture
• Backups
• Security
• Maintenance

Service

• farmerswife (fw) server is hosted, maintained and supported directly by farmerswife support personnel only (product upgrades, service packs, backups, and monitoring).
• It is hosted on Amazon Web Services based on Kubernetes, Amazon Linux nodes with dockerised Ubuntu Linux Containers.

farmerswife cloud is deployed across multiple regions to reduce latency between the clients and the servers.

• In Europe we have locations in London and Frankfurt
• In the US we host with AWS in Virginia, California and US Government locations
• In South Africa in Cape Town
• In APAC in Sydney

Architecture

The diagram shows the connection between fw clients and their fw server out-of-the-box:

The communication between the farmerswife server and the farmerswife desktop client and API port are encrypted with our own self signed certificate by default. The web and mobile client use HTTPS with a trusted certificate.

All files are encrypted at rest. 

Backups

We use a combination of application level backups, system level backups, and full image snapshots to ensure data recovery and restore positions are available in the case of data loss, system loss or a disaster scenario.

* Application Level Backups

The farmerswife server is configured to create snapshot backups at regular intervals.
On our clouded servers this backup is every 5 minutes, and 25 backups are kept on the server for quick access to restore to a recent point in time.

These files can be used in the case of accidental data loss, application rollback, or user error.

* File/System Level Backups

We also implement a system level backups.
This is a complete “mirror” copy of the farmerswife server’s root installation directory/package and includes the latest application level backups available on the system.

The schedule and retention is:

Every 5 mins, kept for 24 hours
Every 2 hours, kept for 5 days
Every day, kept for 30 days.

This encrypted backup is stored on AWS S3 persistent storage in the same region as the hosted server.

This backup  will allow for recovery in the case of server failure, or restore to an earlier point in time than those available in the application level backups

* Full System Snapshots

Finally, for Disaster Recovery we regularly take snapshot of the host system storage AWS EBS. This allows the farmerswife support team to fully recover should the infrastructure become unavailable.

For this we use an automation tool called Gemini.

The schedule and retention is:

Every day, take a daily snapshot.

Keep the last 10 daily snapshots. 

In summary, this configuration ensures frequent snapshots in the short term (every 5 minutes and every hour), while also maintaining longer-term snapshots (daily and monthly) to provide a comprehensive backup strategy and recovery position.

Security

All servers are protected by Firewalls and web proxies.
We can also configure this aspect to only allow certain IP's to the farmerswife server, for example to your company's premises or your VPN's IP's.
The other maintenance ports are only accessible to farmerswife allowed IP’s, which are on our administration secure tunnel which is only accessible to our support staff.

Maintenance

When the support department needs to do some debugging to solve any issue you may encounter they will send a backup-copy of your farmerswife database to one of our servers to use for troubleshooting. This backup-copy is encrypted with our own proprietary encryption technology and sent through a secure connection.