FTCloud Architecture – APAC
The FTCloud environment is hosted by Amazon Web Services – Tier 1 Data Centres with both the Primary, Secondary DR sites and Tertiary Backup located in Sydney. All data is hosted within Australia. The below high-level diagram provides an outline of the FTCloud environment:
FTCloud Architecture – Europe
The FTCloud environment is hosted by Amazon Web Services – Tier 1 Data Centres with both the Primary, Secondary DR sites and Tertiary Backup located in London. All data is hosted within The United Kingdom.
FastTrack360 Application/Client Architecture
The below high-level diagram provides an outline of the FTCloud environment:
FastTrack360 is a multi-tenanted environment but unlike many other cloud-based SaaS solutions FastTrack’s multi-tenancy is based on a shared infrastructure model where client environments are securely isolated from each other. So, your environment will be in a completely separate instance from other clients. This means there is no sharing of websites, database, or any other services with FTCloud. This structure provides complete peace of mind, knowing that your data isn’t going be accessed by anyone else.
Client Environment Outline
The implementation of FastTrack360 system will consist of the following separate environments per customer;
Production Environment: The Production FastTrack360 environment.
UAT (User Acceptance Testing):
FastTrack360 Customers - The UAT environment will be used to test any scenario, parallel runs, data migrations or integration tools prior to setting up the live environment. This environment is a temporary environment for the period of the project only and will be decommissioned 30 days post go live. Should you wish to maintain permanent access to a UAT environment please talk to your Account Manager as they can provide such access based on an additional hosting fee.
FastTrack360 – Front Office only Customers - The UAT environment will be offered if there is a Data Migration requirement for the project. Should you wish to have a UAT environment please talk to your Sales Person/Account Manager as they can provide such access based on an additional hosting fee.
Training: FastTrack360 (End to End Customers Only) - A training environment with pre-loaded training data will be provided to support customers staff to familiarise themselves with the product prior to go live. This environment is a temporary environment only and will be decommissioned 30 days post go live. Should you wish to have permanent access to a training environment please discuss this with your Sales Person / Account Manager as they can provide such access based on an additional hosting fee.
Service Monitoring
FastTrack360 is monitored at every layer, 24/7/365. All physical infrastructure is monitored by the data centre provider, including but not limited to, power supply, air conditioning, internet connectivity, network switches, routers, storage, physical servers, and security intrusion.
On top of this, FastTrack360 also has proactive service monitoring in place at three levels:
DataDog
Monitors every server in the FastTrack360 cloud environment. We monitor; CPU, Memory, Disk space, windows services, IIS sites and Application Pools, network connectivity, server health and availability, I/O performance and capacity, databases, and backups.
Monitors the applications performance of each application, pages and services including web service and database interaction. FastTrack undergoes regular testing and tuning of all monitoring alerts, ensuring we get notified of a problem and resolve it as quickly as possible.
24/7/365 DBA Monitoring
FastTrack has partnered with leading DBA service organisation, RockSolid SQL, to provide proactive 24/7/365 database service monitoring of the FTCloud platform. As the database is the heart of the solution it is not acceptable to just monitor hardware so performance of the application and use of resources is also proactively monitored 24/7/365. The DBA partner works proactively with FastTrack to maintain, upgrades and resolve any issues.
The product also has its own built-in monitoring and alerts for services to self-diagnose any issue and alert the Customer Service Team should any service incur trouble. This includes application parsing, communications, timesheet interpretation and report delivery.
Service Maintenance
Planned maintenance is undertaken on a monthly basis to apply any operating system, database server patching on FTCloud;
APAC – Last Saturday of the month from 11pm-1am AEST.
UK – Last Monday of the month from 11pm-1am GMT.
Notification of planned maintenance is provide with 7 days’ notice and is advised via;
Status Page; email subscription notification
Visible on the dashboard in FastTrack360 to all users.
For all critical emergency maintenance FastTrack will take every effort to provide as much notice as possible. Notification of emergency maintenance will utilise the same channels.
Upgrade Process
FastTrack’s product release strategy is broken into three categories of releases:
Enhancement Releases
Service Patch – Planned Maintenance Release
Service Patch – Un-planned Hotfix Release
On average there are 2 planned Enhancement Releases per annum, Planned Service Patch Maintenance will be released as required to address software bugs and Unplanned Service Patch Hotfixes are released when severity one issues are raised that requires immediate attention
FastTrack undertakes a controlled process for releasing upgrades into customers’ environment. It’s important to note that all clients have their own controlled environment on shared infrastructure which allows FastTrack to manage the rollout of any upgrade based on an defined schedule. No upgrade is released without completion of the SDLC (Software Development life Cycle) including Development, Testing, ALPHA and BETA phases.
The IT Operations Team manages the coordination and deployment of FastTrack360 new environments and upgrades to new release versions within FTCloud. The release of a new version of any of the above types of releases follows the below steps:
The commercial release of the product will be exposed to customers via two channels:
The FTA (FastTrack Administrator) communications, email, channel outlining the scope of the releases and release timings.
In product messaging to all users advising of the release schedule and new features.
Optional UAT – User Acceptance Testing
FastTrack’s preference is to directly upgrade customers into production with the latest release. All releases have gone through a rigorous BETA program where the software is validated in both testing and production environments with a customer representative group before it’s made commercially available to all customers.
If a customer requests the release to be applied to a controlled UAT environment and the customer does not have a funded UAT environment, they may request a temporary environment which will have hosting costs. Please speak to your Account Manager if you have this requirement.
Production Upgrade:
FastTrack will schedule customers into groups to apply the upgrade to all customers, that typically spans a period of 3-4 weeks. The upgrade dates are communicated to each group of customers and are commonly scheduled for;
APAC Thursday/Friday evening from 8-12pm AEST
UK - Mondays 11-1am GMT.
Please Note: If a customer requests the upgrade to be applied at a time outside of the pre-arrange timeslots upgrade changes will apply.
The customer will need to plan and coordinate any end user education, manage any change to processes and plan any configuration changes to be applied post the upgrade and prior to commencement of operational usage.
FastTrack will apply the upgrade, run some post upgrade sanity checks on each environment and then communicate to the customers on completion.
Deployment Process
FastTrack utilises a number of deployment tools to manage the deployment of FastTrack360 into the FTCloud environment. One of the key tools is Octopus which allows for a scripted, accurate and seamless deployment of FastTrack360.
With this Octopus Agent we can:
Remotely one-click deploy FastTrack360
Seamlessly apply hotfixes
One-click deploy FastTrack360 upgrades
These processes can be manually triggered, scheduled, and run for all environments or selected environments.