Technology

A complete system for the organization

With an emphasis on the social sector, Serv.ly is suited to perform the tasks typically solved by Content Management Systems (CMS), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. In traditional CMS systems, the article is the fundamental object that most other things seem to revolve around. In business systems, the people and the organizations are the objects that are at the center of the action. Serv.ly has both of these at its core. Articles and rich media can be used both on websites and emails. Every time you enter a person as a customer, donor, recipient, member, etc. you register basic personal information only once. Therefore, there is no duplication and you get powerful searches across all business modules of the platform.

Open architecture

Serv.ly is built with a modern decoupled architecture where the front-end and backend are separated through the open source API technology GraphQL. This means that front-end components can be replaced, extended or integrated with external systems and applications. Typical use cases include custom-built forms, mobile applications for face-to-face recruitment or telemarketing, as well as automated reporting and data analysis outside of the platform itself. This architecture gives organizations ownership and direct access to their own data — a significant limitation in many proprietary off-the-shelf SaaS platforms. As the cost of software development continues to decrease, we believe this is an important foundation for future-proof solutions where AI-generated code can efficiently extend and customize software products.

Open and standardized underlying technologies

At the core of Serv.ly are world’s most widely used and proven technologies that run some of the most advanced and trafficked platforms and websites. Serv.ly takes advantage of these popular and proven libraries and projects: Linux, Docker, MySQL, Redis, PHP, Go, Nginx, VueJS, GraphQL, Apache Solr, RabbitMQ, ELK, Grafana.

Servly's base architecture is significant because it does not rely on any single programming language or component. Most of the underlying technologies are interchangeable which allows Serv.ly to evolve and utilize the best current practices.

Scalability

We build Serv.ly with scalability in mind for both traffic and data volume. Serv.ly is a multi-tenant system, as a result one deployment and code base is serving all clients. This makes it easy for frequent upgrades and improvements that all clients benefit from immediately. Clients are always using the latest version of the platform.

Through Amazon cloud services, we have set up a virtual server grid of balanced application and database servers. Every node in the infrastructure can handle a hit for any of the websites or applications. This makes Serv.ly behave gracefully at peak loads, and it also makes it easy to quickly add more servers as the average load grows. Serv.ly scaling doesn’t require human assistance and is performed automatically based on load metrics.

Because Serv.ly is built in the cloud we have unlimited storage available. Serv.ly will never run out of disk space.

Safe and secure cloud storage

Serv.ly is hosted in Stockholm, Sweden, on AWS (Amazon Web Services), the world´s leading cloud services provider. We utilize multi-factor authentication and high level encryption on all personal information stored. Personal information is protected by a double-layered security mechanism including access control and privacy safety. Serv.ly has received sizable grants from the Norwegian Research Council for its groundbreaking developments in secure safe storage, and the handling of privacy data.

Reliability

Cloud technologies are always more reliable than bare metal hosting. On the rare occasion that one of the servers in the grid needs to be replaced or upgraded, what previously took two hours or more now takes less than two minutes. With balanced servers, the infrastructure will not take any downtime at all. All vitals of the system are set up with alarms which immediately notify the Serv.ly response team by SMS and email. Reports and updates on system issues are reported on https://iscornerstoneup.com/.

Backups

All files stored in Serv.ly are automatically backed up with lifecycle rules in the AWS S3 file system. We keep old versions of files and deleted files for 1 year. In addition, we make a full copy of the database every 24 hours and store multiple copies securely for a period of time, considering relevant privacy legislation.