Global expansion for small-scale farmers supported by AWS

Global expansion through the AWS cloud for small-scale farmers

The IT solutions of Farmforce AS support businesses that distribute agricultural products from small and medium-sized farmers in emerging markets. The solutions help provide information about the origin and production conditions of products destined for the global market.

Since 2012, the company has delivered a web and mobile platform with tracking right down to the smallest patch of land. The solution is designed for farmers who operate under rudimentary conditions. But it is also an important platform for agronomists and field workers in following up the growing and harvesting process, and for users working on food safety and exporting, where traceability is crucial.

Farmforce’s objective is to facilitate increased productivity and better market access for small-scale farmers, in order to improve their living standards.

The challenge

Farmforce has approximately 50 customers in 25 countries – with 150,000 end users of the solution. With customers spread out around the globe they needed to sync significant volumes of data to places where mobile networks have limited data capacity. Additionally they were looking at the ability to work proactively on developing the solution and handling operational incidents across the globe.

“We needed a partner who could support us when issues occurred and also work proactively improving our solution.”
Spencer Morley, Chief Operations Officer at Farmforce.

Why Amazon Web Services and Basefarm?

Farmforce chose AWS as its business platform, but wanted a partner to take responsibility for solutions and operations. After a comprehensive selection process the AWS partner Basefarm was chosen. Responsibility for AWS was transferred to Basefarm which has a strong presence within mission-critical cloud operations in Europe.

Farmforce supplies its software solutions as SaaS (Software as a Service). AWS’s global cloud provides accessibility in the emerging markets in which the company operates. In this way, the solutions are made available in real time to the very large number of users. It is not only accessibility that is important, but also the rapid response time that AWS offers.

The spread of customers and users across large areas of the globe also entails syncing significant data volumes to places where mobile networks have limited data capacity. Farmforce wanted to avoid this becoming a bottleneck for its expansion plans. Basefarm was assigned a pivotal role in leveraging AWS even more intelligently – including in terms of capacity and range – which has contributed to Farmforce’s continued solid growth.

Farmforce has access to Basefarm’s Guided Operations service that provides operational advice on how to leverage and access AWS’s comprehensive range of services, including infrastructure, core and platform services, technical and business support, management, automation and monitoring. Basefarm is also building and managing IaC for the customer’s AWS infrastructure. Through the Frontline Operations service, Basefarm monitors its customers’ systems with AWS 24/7/365. The services include ensuring maximum uptime for Farmforce’s systems.

Compliance and the secure handling of personal data are also important areas for Farmforce.

Farmforce uses a number of core services from Amazon. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups are used to ensure availability and performance, and AWS ASG spins up EC2 instances, i.e. VMs – virtual machines. In front of this, there is load balancing, using AWS Elastic Load Balancing to distribute inbound application traffic across multiple services, such as Amazon EC2 and containers. The Application Load Balancer distribution service has a key role in its capacity as a modern load balancer for online services. The Amazon ECS container solution provides a way to run containers in the AWS cloud in parallel with the other services Farmforce uses. As a result, Farmforce gains a comprehensive service layer in a single cloud and an area with VMs and containers in the same location.

The Amazon RDS database cloud gives Farmforce rapid access to new databases and scaling up of existing ones, whether for storage or performance reasons.

Advantages

From previously setting up and managing AWS solutions itself, Farmforce has brought in Basefarm to take responsibility for solutions and operations. Basefarm has played a key role in leveraging the AWS cloud to promote Farmforce’s solid growth on a global scale. With AWS as a tool, Basefarm has helped boost Farmforce’s capacity and scope in 25 countries. EC2 VMs administrated by the AWS ASG service, load balancing with AWS ELB and a single cloud for both VMs and containers are key aspects of this solution deploying database management in Amazon RDS.

“Our Basefarm contact is a great guy. He gives the support we need and is proactive and helpful.
I appreciate Basefarm’s professional and dedicated work.”
Spencer Morley, Chief Operations Officer at Farmforce.

About Farmforce

Farmforce has been created to help smallholders gain access to formal markets and improve the effectiveness of outgrower schemes. Formal markets can increase the number of potential buyers for smallholder produce but these markets require traceability and compliance to food safety standards; something which has traditionally been challenging and time consuming. Farmforce is helping to change the game by using mobile technology to make traceability and compliance an integral part of smallholder production and to redefine the relationship between growers, manufacturers and markets.