Service
- farmerswife (fw) server is hosted, maintained and supported directly by farmerswife support personnel only (product upgrades, service packs, backups, user and security management and configuration).
- Complete system administration support, incl. provisioned test databases as requested for Quality Assurance.
- Cloud tools platform are based on Alpine Linux Docker containers.
- API integration capabilities for any cloud or on-premises system.
farmerswife cloud is deployed across multiple regions to get as close to the client location and reduce latency between the clients and the servers.
- In Europe we have cloud services hosted on Hertzner and Amazon AWS infrastructure.
- In the US we host with Leaseweb and AWS.
- In other regions we use a local provider - usually one of the above - depending on the client location to provide the best local solution.
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 HTTP instead of HTTPS as the self signed certificate is flagged as insecure by all major browsers.
For our cloud hosted services we use a different approach by using a reverse proxy as shown in the below diagram:
Encrypted access is provided for the cloud hosted customer by providing "company-name.farmerswife.com" subdomain address access.
Backups
We use a combination of application level backups and system level backups.
The farmerswife server is configured to create snapshot backups at regular intervals. The back up location and frequency are defined on the server application. By default this is set to occur every 5 to 15 minutes (depending on system size).
We also implement system level backups using a third party backup solution. This is a complete "mirror" copy of the farmerswife Server's root installation directory/package and the latest snapshots. This backup is transferred off the server to an encrypted location, to allow for recovery in the case of server failure.
Security
All servers are protected by Firewalls and reverse web proxies that allow connection to the farmerswife ports from everywhere. The other maintenance ports are only accessible to farmerswife allowed IP's.
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.
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.
Once the support agent finishes debugging they delete that backup. As a note every laptop used by our support department uses disk encryption and they are password protected.