An Agile Farm Management Information System Framework for Precision Agriculture

Early Farm Management Information Systems (FMIS) implementations were focused on data entry and report generation within a farm. The growth in areas such as Precision Agriculture (PA) is changing the landscape and approach taken to develop such systems. The lack of standardised data formats to support the transfer of data between systems is one of the major concerns that have been raised relating to the development of FMIS. The modern FMIS based on the distributed systems which inherently supports the sharing of resources and data. Service-oriented architectures are more flexible in relation to the delivery of software packages; for example, cloud computing can be utilized to offer Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to agriculturalists. In general, these systems are monolithic, which is built as a single unit of software. These monolithic systems have several challenges, especially scalability, rebuild, retesting and deployment issues. The modern microservice approach can be recognised as the solution for these issues. Microservice approach is organised a distributed application as a collection of services, where each service design, implement and run independently. The basic microservice concept is based on virtual machines and the Application Program Interface (API). The next level of container based microservice systems has less runtime overhead compared to virtual machine basic microsevices. This technology is also more efficient as many containers can be run in a single virtual machine. The container based system also comes with key features and tooling around to addressing microservice challenges. The researchers conclude the paper by recommending a container based microservice architecture for agile FMIS in precision agriculture.