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.
- We are currently in the process of migrating all Hertzner and Leaseweb hosting to a new AWS solution (H2 2024)
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 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.cloud farmerswife.com" subdomain address access.
Backups
We use a combination of application level backups, folder 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. The back up location and frequency are defined in the server application. By default is set to occur 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 using a third party backup solution (Duplicati). 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:
Backup every 2 hours kept for 30 days
Daily backup kept for 6 months.
This encrypted backup is transferred to AWS S3 persistent storage in the same region as the hosted server.
This back will allow for recovery in the case of server failure, or restore to an earlier point in time than those available on the server.
* Full System Snapshots
Finally, for Disaster Recovery we regularly take snapshot of the host system storage AWS EBS. This would allow us to fully recover should the infrastructure become unavailable.
For this we use a automation tool called Gemini.
The schedule and retention is:
Every 15 minutes, take a snapshot of the fw-servervol-pvc persistent volume claim.
Keep the last 4 snapshots.
This means we will always have snapshots from the last hour.
Every hour, take an hourly snapshot.
Keep the last 24 hourly snapshots.
This means we will always have snapshots from the last 24 hours.
Every day:
Every day, take a daily snapshot.
Keep the last 14 daily snapshots.
This means we will always have snapshots from the last 14 days.
Every month:
Every month, take a monthly snapshot.
Keep the last 6 monthly snapshots.
This means we will always have snapshots from the last 6 months.
In summary, this configuration ensures frequent snapshots in the short term (every 15 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 VPN 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.