On-Premise & Hybrid Hosting

An alternative to default cloud hosting, bespoke on-premise or hybrid hosting gives you location control over data residency.

On-premise or hybrid hosting are available with the Elite Suite Max add-on.

Hosting Options

Get in touch with your Yola account representative to discuss which hosting solution is right for you, and its manual deployment procedure.

• On-premise means all database content (e.g. AI configurations, conversations, and profiles of registered people), bucket content (files & attachments), and the Yola platform (web app) are all hosted independently by you.

• Hybrid Hosting means all database and bucket content is hosting independently by you, but hosting and provision of the Yola platform (web app) is maintained by us.

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System requirements

Software

• OS: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS

• Web Server: Nginx 1.14.0 or later

• Docker: 24.0.0 or later

• Docker Compose: 2.23.0 or later

• AWS CLI: 2.13.30 or later

• Python: 3.10 or later

Hardware

• Memory: 32GB RAM minimum

• Disk Space: 20GB required for safe installation. An additional 500 GB for database storage is recommended.

Network

• Allowed traffic through port 80/443

External Services

• SendGrid API key

• OpenAI or Azure OpenAI API key

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Chat-GPT data privacy

If you have AI assistant with a Chat-GPT LLM enabled, it's recommended to use Azure's OpenAI service instead of OpenAI directly. The benefits of Azure’s OpenAI service include:

• Faster response times

• 99.9% uptime SLA

• Stronger data privacy

From Microsoft's legal resource for data, privacy, and security for Azure OpenAI Service:

Your prompts (inputs) and completions (outputs), your embeddings, and your training data:

• are NOT available to other customers.

• are NOT available to OpenAI.

• are NOT used to improve OpenAI models.

• are NOT used to improve any Microsoft or 3rd party products or services.

• are NOT used for automatically improving Azure OpenAI models for your use in your resource (The models are stateless, unless you explicitly fine-tune models with your training data).

• Your fine-tuned Azure OpenAI models are available exclusively for your use.

The Azure OpenAI Service is fully controlled by Microsoft; Microsoft hosts the OpenAI models in Microsoft’s Azure environment and the Service does NOT interact with any services operated by OpenAI (e.g. ChatGPT, or the OpenAI API).

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Installation

These installation steps are specific to on-premise hosting and are for reference only. Yola personnel will provide direct guidance on your host migration process.

There are three components that must be served by your local server:

1. The backend platform

2. The Yola platform (web app)

3. The webchat library

These three components can be served directly from Nginx. As components (2) and (3) are pre-built, they only need to be served as static files from Nginx without any configuration.

You will be provided with the following files to scaffold the on-premise deployment:

• A Python file: yola_scaffold.py

• A JSON file: yola_credentials.json

To scaffold:

1. Place both files in your desired installation directory.

2. Run python yola_scaffold.py init

The command will not start Yola. It will create a folder with the relevant service configuration TOML files, authenticate your instance with our private docker container repository, and add a docker-compose.yml.

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Configuration

In the newly created directory, you'll find a subdirectory named backend/config/. This contains all the configurable parameters for the backend platform. While many parameters might not require adjustments, the following are mandatory:

[app]
base_url = "https://{YOUR_URL}"
base_api_url = "https://{YOUR_URL}/api"

[cors]
allow_origins = ['https://{YOUR_URL}']

[sendgrid]
api_key = "{YOUR_SENDGRID_API_KEY}"
from_domain = "{YOUR_DESIRED_EMAIL_FROM}"
inbound_parse_key = "{YOUR_SENDGRID_INBOUND_URL_KEY_PARAM}"

[openai]
api_key = "{YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY}"

[api]
session_middleware_secret_key = "{YOUR_RANDOM_SECRET_KEY_1}"
secret_key = "{YOUR_RANDOM_SECRET_KEY_2}"
algorithm = "HS256"
access_token_expire_minutes = 3600
frontend_url = "https://{YOUR_URL}"

...

Nginx example

The backend platform will run its services on port 8080 of the containers. Each service should be prefixed with api/. The web app and the webchat library will be served from / and /webchat, respectively.

...

location / {
		# Serve web app
    root /home/ubuntu/yola/frontend;
    index index.html;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}

location /webchat {
		# Serve webchat
    root /home/ubuntu/yola/webchat;
    index index.html;
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html;
}

location /api/platform/ {
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol $scheme;
    
    proxy_pass http://platform:8080/;
}

location /api/chatbot/ {
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Protocol $scheme;
    
    proxy_pass http://chatbot:8080/;
}

location /msgrouter_ws/ {
    proxy_http_version 1.1;
    proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
    proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;

    proxy_pass http://msgrouter_ws:9000;
}

...

Managing platform state

• Start the platform: in backend/ run docker compose up -d

• Stop the platform: in backend/ run docker compose down

• Update the platform from remote: python yola_scaffold.py update

• Directly connect to database: psql -U postgres -d platform