Top 10 benefits of Low-code development
Low-code application development is quickly gaining momentum in recent times. Whether it is business users who want to create an app for a specific need or professional developers who want to quickly add features and deploy products faster, all stakeholders of the IT landscape are looking towards low-code development. The rapid growth of Mendix low-code app development platform speaks volumes about this trend. Mendix has reached $100 million annual recurring revenues as of Sep 2020. The company is envisaging to double this number within 18 months.
Low-code app development platforms offer several advantages to organizations. Here are the top 10 benefits of low-code app development.
1) Accelerate Digital Transformation
Today, every organization is embarking on a digital transformation journey. Low-code development accelerates this process by bringing citizen development into the picture. With citizen development, everyone in the team, regardless of their coding skills, can become a part of the software team and quickly build quality apps.
2) Build Customer-centric Products for Improved Customer Experience
By bringing the concerned staff into the application development project, businesses can build and deliver customer-centric products that improve customer experience. For instance, when you are building medical software, nurses and technicians will have a better idea of what customers require than a software engineer who doesn’t have medical knowledge. As such, organizations can build customer-centric products.
3) Increased Productivity
When IT and non-IT teams come together to build apps, it increases productivity. Whether it is visually astonishing designs or feature-rich products, organizations can build and deploy the product in minutes. It increases deployment cycles as well.
4) Reduced Costs
Low-code app development eliminates the need for experienced coders to fully develop an application. While citizen developers build the app, professional developers will add advanced features, customizations, integrations etc. As such, products are quickly built and thereby development costs are significantly reduced. In addition, businesses can save the costs of hiring and managing a full team of professional software developers.
5) Shortage of Skilled Developers
Today, the IT industry is facing a dearth of skilled IT professionals. The proliferation of smartphones brought a need for thousands of mobile apps. However, the industry is not able to match the number of IT professionals with the app development requirements. Low-code development solves this challenge by bringing citizen developers on board.
6) Removing silos between IT and business
Dealing with silos between IT and business has been one of the biggest challenges for management for decades. As DevOps tries to bridge this gap, low-code development compliments DevOps by bringing business teams and IT teams onto the same platform.
7) Dealing with shadow IT
One of the important concerns for security teams is shadow IT. It is a term used to describe the problem of employees using systems, laptops, applications and mobile devices without the approval of the IT department. The increasing use of cloud-based apps and smartphones adds up to this challenge. Shadow IT brings security vulnerabilities in the form of compliance violations, data leaks, system crashes etc. With low-code development, all devices used by the employees will be operating on IT-approved platforms which means IT teams have better visibility and control over shadow IT. Moreover, businesses can drive innovation and increase productivity with shadow IT while eliminating security concerns.
8) Meet changing business IT needs
Today, business IT requirements are rapidly changing. As such, businesses are required to closely monitor changing business trends and realign strategies accordingly. When new opportunities are identified, businesses should be able to quickly tap into them and cannot wait till the prototyping goes through the traditional development model. Using citizen developer services, businesses can quickly build prototypes, test them and then pass on the prototypes to the development teams for optimization and improvisation.
9) Reduced Maintenance
Apps built using low-code development platforms generate fewer bugs as they are built on standardized and pretested platforms. As the platform automatically generates the code, errors are minimized and the quality of code is enhanced. As such, testing and maintenance burdens are significantly reduced, enabling developers to focus more on the quality of the product.
10) Modernizing Legacy Apps
Legacy apps can become a burden for an organization over some time. Low-code development platforms enable you to integrate legacy infrastructure with the cloud-native architecture and enjoy the same business value with increased scalability and availability. You can easily and cost-effectively modernize legacy apps and future-proof IT processes.
Low-code application development is the new norm in IT circles in recent times. Businesses that quickly embrace the low-code trend are sure to surge ahead!
Accelerate Digital Transformation in your Organization with Low-Code/No-Code Application Development
Low-code or No-code app development is a method of creating code using a visual application development environment wherein users can drag n drop components and connect them to build applications of all types.
Heading to MWC 2018
The most awaited event in the Telecom/Mobile industry is just around the corner!
Where: Fira Gran Via, Barcelona, Spain
When: 26 Feb – 1 Mar, 2018
We at CloudTern are happy to announce our participation at the Mobile World Congress this year in Barcelona. Our CEO will be there to discuss with you about “Churn Prediction using Machine Learning“, “IoT Solution – Device Control and Monitoring” and “Batch and Real-Time Data Streaming/Processing with Apache Kafka and Apache Storm”.
For better communication, start booking a meeting with us. Please send an email to ramu@cloudtern.com
Laravel project setup in AWS
Below are the steps to set up Laravel project in AWS instance.
- Login to the AWS instance.
- sudo yum update
- sudo yum install httpd24 php56 php56-pdo php56-mbstring php56-mcrypt php56-mysqlnd
- sudo curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php
- sudo mv composer.phar /usr/local/bin/composer
- sudo yum install git
- cd /var/www/html
- sudo git clone https://username@example.com/path/to/repository.git
- Rename the cloned repository/project directory if required.
- cd project-name
- sudo vi .env
- Change the MySQL connection details.
- php artisan config:cache
- cd /etc/httpd/conf
- sudo vi httpd.conf
- Insert below commands
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/project-name/public
<Directory /var/www/html/project-name/>
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
- sudo service httpd start
Cloud-Init Cheat Sheet
Cloud-init is a multi-distribution package that handles early initialization of cloud instances. Some of the things cloud-init can do are
- set up the hostname.
- setting up a local user.
- Updating and installing the packages on Linux.
- Disk setup and mounting the additional volumes.
More information can be found at Cloud-Init
Today most of the distribution support cloud-init and using cloud-init can run all cloud providers(AWS, Azure, GCP). In this article, I want to show some of the code-snippets I have tried in AWS with different distributions mainly Ubuntu and Amazon Linux.
#To create hostname :
#cloud-config
#set the hostmachine name
fqdn: myhostname.com
This will set the hostname of the deployed instance to myhostname.com. But the default AMI from Amazon Linux does not support changing the hostname. You need to launch the instance and change the preserve_hostname to false in etc/cloud/cloud.cfg.Then you need to build an image from that instance and launch a new instance from the build image with the above cloud-config script to change the hostname.
#To add additional users to the instance
#cloud-config
users:
- name: bob
sudo: ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
groups: admin, root
This will add user bob to the instance along with the default user created by distro’s like for Amazon Linux default user ec2-user and for Ubuntu default user is ubuntu.
#To update packages and install new ones:
#cloud-config
package_update:true
packages:
- pwgen
- nginx
The above will update the distro package system and install the pwgen and nginx packages.
#Disk Setup and mount the additional EBS volumes.
#cloud-config
# - /dev can ommited for device names starting with xvd, sd, hd, vd
# if device does not exist at the time, an entry will still be written to /etc/fstab
mounts:
- [xvdb, /data,"auto","defaults,nofail", "0", "0"]
#setup the file system on the device
fs_setup:
- label: data
filesystem: 'ext4'
device: '/dev/xvdb'
partition: auto
runcmd:
- mkdir /data
This will basically set up the disk to filesystem ext4 and add the mounting device to /etc/fstab in Linux.
Thanks for viewing.
Best Regards
Naveen
