Frappe Cloud Hybrid

This article describes the Hybrid Model of hosting your ERPNext Sites with Frappe Cloud.

FC Hybrid leverages "your server, your data" ideology by setting up the basic requirements to run an ERPNext Site(s) controlled from FC Dashboard.

We use Ansible Playbooks to setup the server and our In House developed orchestrator called Agent to do site related activities like updates, backups, restores and migrations. Agent is extensively used to control all the 6000+ sites and 50+ Servers currently on Frappe Cloud.

Difference from FC Servers

The difference of Self Hosted Servers from FC servers is that, one single server which you will be providing will be used as both App and Database Server. Wherein in FC Servers, one s erver handles App and the other is used as the Database Server.

These self hosted servers won’t be in Frappe’s control and it’s maintenace will be completely on the owner of the server.

Benefits and Features

Control and Security: Frappe Cloud BYOD allows customers to maintain complete control over their infrastructure and data, which is especially important for customers who have strict security requirements or are subject to regulatory compliance.
Flexibility: Frappe Cloud BYOD allows customers to scale their infrastructure up or down as needed, without having to worry about capacity constraints or other limitations.
All features of Frappe Cloud including

Offsite Backups
Server Monitoring
Frappe Cloud Hosting Support
Multiple Sites on Same Server
Auto Updates on Site

Server Assumptions

While creating a server from the UI, the system assumes the following

The OS is Ubuntu 20
root/sudo access is given the access to FC
There are no other users other than root user
The default SSH User and SSH Port is root and 22 respectively
The server is accessible from the Internet
A DNS Record with your own domain is pointed to the server

Architecture

This is a simple architecture diagram of a Self Hosted Server Setup with FC

>This image assumes there are 3 benches in the server, thus 3 docker containers.

Request Flows

Agent Requests(Purple) are directly sent to the server. They are http requests and they execute a site operation and once that is finished, sends out a JSON Response directly back to Frappe Cloud
Site Requests: Are channeled to the server via Proxy Server. This Proxy server is currently in Mumbai Region and the Traffic is routed to the end server via an Nginx Proxy. These site requests are handled by the Nginx present in the Self Hosted Server and sent to the Docker container with the site.
Exporters: Collect the monitoring data from the server and notifies the Frappe Cloud team if anything anomalous is happening
Database Requests: These are direct database calls from the sites.

Folders and Structure

All the Agent related configs will be in an agent folder in the frappe user
The Benches will be in a benches directory under the frappe user. These doesn’t have the complete capabilty of a frappe bench.
All the archived benches will be in the archived folder
The frappe user’s UID and GID will be 1000:1000
There will be docker containers which are actually the benches and will have complete access to bench commands

Here is the folder structure inside the benches directory

Accessing Bench commands can only be done from within the container