Why is Cloud Native App Development the future of IT?
“Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future” - John F. Kennedy
The above quote is apt for this cloud computing era. Today, businesses are looking at the past and changing their current IT operations accordingly.
However, it is important to look at the future to stay in and ahead of the competition.
The constant change that happens in the IT landscape has accelerated with the advent of cloud computing.
As every IT product or resource is delivered over the Internet as a service, it is high time that software developers realign their software development strategies to suit the cloud landscape.
Cloud native app development is the right approach to make your businesses future-proof. The covid-19 pandemic that pushed businesses into a work-from-home environment compliments the cloud native app development.
What is Cloud Native App Development?
Cloud native app development means different things for different people. On a simpler note, it is an approach to building future-proof cloud apps that take advantage of cloud processes and platforms to deliver a consistent user experience across all devices, cloud models and environments.
Portability, high scalability and adaptability are the three key aspects that are driving cloud-native app development in IT circles in recent times. While business processes are rapidly changing, businesses are required to quickly adapt to these changes and build cloud native apps. Secondly, these apps should deliver a consistent user experience across a range of devices which means portability is the key requirement. They should be scalable enough to meet traffic spikes. Cloud native app development offers these 3 key qualities to IT processes.
Here are some key components of cloud native apps:
Microservices Architecture
Microservices architecture is a type of software architecture wherein complex applications are built as small, loosely coupled, independent and autonomous services that perform a specific task and communicate with each other via APIs. It is a variant of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that enables developers to quickly build and deploy applications.
Microservices architecture allows businesses to quickly adapt to changing IT requirements as applications built using this architecture are flexible and easily extendable to suit different IT environments. So, you don’t have to code apps from scratch for each IT environment. You can begin small and massively scale up within a quick time. Moreover, these independent services allow you to scale specific services instead of scaling the entire app. The biggest advantage is that you can customize your technology stack based on your cloud environment without getting stuck with a standard approach.
Containers
As applications are centralized hosted and delivered over the cloud, portability becomes a key requirement. Containerization enables you to virtualize the operating system and run applications inside containers. A container is a portable computing environment comprising binaries, libraries, dependents and other configuration files required by an application. By using software containers, businesses can easily run applications on various environments such as mobile, desktop, cloud, bare metal, virtual machines etc. Software containers bring a greater level of agility, portability and reusability that are important for cloud native applications.
Software-Defined Infrastructure
As cloud services are centrally hosted and accessible from any location, administrators should be able to manage the infrastructure from anywhere as well. Software-defined infrastructure virtualizes hardware infrastructure, enabling you to automatically add, delete, stop and start any network resource using software from any location. By implementing software-defined infrastructure, cloud native apps can be easily managed from any location.
Application Programming Interface (API)
Application Programming Interface (API) is an interface that facilitates communication between different applications or services. As cloud native apps are built as multiple services, they use APIs to communicate with each other as well as with other 3rd party applications. For instance, if you want to add multiple languages to your app, you can use the Google Translate API without writing the code from scratch.
DevOps
As cloud native apps use the microservices architecture to build services as small and incremental blocks, continuous integration, continuous testing and continuous deployment becomes a key requirement. DevOps helps you to rapidly build and deploy quality cloud native apps.
Why Cloud Native App Development is the Future?
As businesses are aggressively embracing cloud technology, cloud native apps are turning out to be a beneficial option. Cloud native apps are faster to market and minimize risks. They can be easily deployed and managed using Docker and Kubernetes. Along with fault tolerance, they are capable of self-healing for most issues.
As these apps use a modular design, developing them is easy and cost-effective. Different teams can separately work on each service. Most importantly, when these apps are deployed, you can turn off some services that are not running. That way, you can significantly save operational cloud costs. The serverless and open-source model allows you to optimize the pay-per-use subscription model by reducing the computing time to milliseconds. You can scale up specific services too. Cloud native apps allow you to implement an auto-scale feature that automatically scales specific services without manual intervention. This is why most enterprises prefer cloud native apps. The downtime for cloud native apps is minimal as they can quickly pick up on alternation regions when a server goes down.
As most mobile apps use web-centric programming languages such as Python, PHP, JavaScript, Ruby, cloud native apps that are built on similar environments would perform well and deliver a consistent user experience. Now, developers don’t have to worry about the target environment but focus on business requirements and features. Adding new features or making changes to the app is easy as well. Enterprises love cloud native apps as they are easy to monitor and manage using apps such as AppDynamic, NewRelic etc. Similarly, you can debug them using apps such as Splunk and ElasticSearch.
Challenges with Cloud Native App Development
Cloud native app development comes with certain challenges as well. The biggest challenge is the presence of hundreds of services. Developers should be careful while handling and integrating all these services. They should also keep an eye on the size of the service. It is recommended to minimize the number of services wherever possible.
Secondly, data security and storage requires careful attention. As enterprise run containers on immutable infrastructure, the entire internal data goes off when you shut down the app. So, you should make sure that the data is securely stored. In addition, when an app uses APIs of a specific cloud platform, you should be careful to manage that API while migrating to another environment. Moreover, protecting data from unauthorized access is important.
As the cloud becomes an integral part of business processes, choosing cloud native app development helps you keep your infrastructure future-proof!
Does 5G Technology Cause Corona Virus or other health issues?
Corona Virus has become the latest buzz everywhere in recent times. Be it news, whatsapp messages, facebook posts or phone calls, all you hear is mostly about this pandemic disease. However, not every Corona-related post is true. Recently, people burnt the 5G cell towers in UK amid the fear of 5G radio waves causing corona virus. According to BBC News, three 5G tower masts were burnt down in Melling, Liverpool and Birmigham in the first week of April 2020. As these fake posts are virally forwarded, it is important to know if 5G technology causes Corona or any other health issues.
An Overview of 5G Technology
5G technology is the next generation wireless standard that is redefining the way devices connect and communicate over the network. This fifth generation technology offers high speed internet connectivity of up to 10-20 Gigabits per second with a low latency of 1 millisecond. This is possible because 5G operates across multiple bandwidths to leverage and expand spectrum resources. It operates in both 5G New Radio (NR) sub -6 GHz and 5G NR mmWave (24 GHz – 100 GHz) of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is the method used by 5G technology wherein it reduces interference with digital signal modulation across multi channels. As such, 5G offers higher internet speeds and accommodates 100x more traffic with greater network efficiency along with a 10x lower latency when compared with 4G. It means you can watch high definition streaming videos, use AR/VR apps and play multi-player HD cloud games in real time.
The availability of multiple sensors and low latency means that you can efficiently monitor operations at a remote industrial plant, assist a surgeon in operation, control logistics, create design and manage smart cities, autonomous cars etc. The list is endless. It allows network slicing wherein you can create subnets and categorize data based on your priorities. While earlier generation wireless standards such as 2G, 3G and 4G operated in the 2.4 GHz – 2.6 GHz spectrum, the new 5G technologies uses both the 2.4 GHz and the 5 GHz spectrum. This broader range of spectrum gives the scalability to accommodate a variety of devices operating at high speeds.
5G and Corona Virus
As 5G operates in a higher spectrum when compared with earlier wireless standards, there has been several theories about the health implications of 5G on humans. Corona Virus is actually named as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Corona Virus 2 (SARS – CoV 2). It is also called New Corona Virus 19 (nCOVID-19). As the name says, nCOVID-19 is a biological virus that spreads from droplets transmitted by humans when they sneeze or cough to nearby people. Once the virus gets into contact with a human, they quickly move into the nasal passage and mucous membrane. These virus particles come with a thronged protein particles on their surfaces that get hooked to human cell membranes. As the genetic material of the virus enter the cell membrane, it will hijack the cell and multiple itself to exponentially reproduce the virus.
On the other hand, 5G technology uses radio waves that have less energy than visible light. While 5G is a physical component, corona virus is a biological component. So, they are two different worlds altogether. As 5G waves cannot carry the virus, it cannot spread the virus. The International Commission On Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (ICNIRP), the scientific body that sets guidelines for EMF radiation, gave an official statement that 5G technology doesn’t cause Corona Virus.
The Effect of 5G Radiation on Health
The term ‘radiation’ is always frightening as it reminds everyone of nuclear radiation, ultra violet radiation, and gamma radiation. However, 5G technology radiation is not harmful. The electromagnetic spectrum is actually divided into two portions:
Non-ionising radiation: In this type of radiation, the energy per quantum is not enough to ionize molecules or atoms. In the electromagnetic spectrum, 700 MHz to 750 THz is considered as non-ionizing radiation portion.
Ionizing Radiation: The energy of the radio waves here have the ability to ionize an atom or a molecule. As the frequency is high, the energy is high too. Gamma rays, X-Rays, UV Rays fall into this category
5G technology operates within the 2.4 GHz – 5GHz. The possible future 5G air waves are expected to operate between 26 GHz and 66 GHz. As such, the radiation has less energy than light. So, it is not harmful to human health. The ICNIRP body regulates the maximum EMF radiation levels and sets guidelines. As per these guidelines, the current 5G emissions are very minimal. While there are a few scientists who claim that 5G radiation is harmful to human health, they haven’t been able to provide minimal scientific evidence to prove their point.
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
