How can businesses make profits with a low-code/no-code approach?
The year 2021 seems to be the year of low-code / no-code app development. Though the low-code approach is still in its nascent stage, businesses are already reaping benefits from it.
The month of June has already seen some interesting announcements related to low-code / no-code app development.
Mendix Shows the Way
A notable announcement came from Mendix on June 8, 2021, stating that Dutch’s largest insurance company TVM has partnered with Mendix to develop Bumper, a low-code app that accelerates damage claims processes.
When a vehicle meets with an accident and gets damaged, you can instantly add the damage details into the app and get a detailed report of the damage. It helps you to smartly process damage claims while giving you insights into the process in real-time. As such, damage claims are quickly and efficiently processed while delivering high customer satisfaction.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) enters the Low-code Arena
On June 17 2021, Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the launch of Workflow Studio, a low-code app development tool that enables organizations to quickly build applications with minimal coding skills on its public cloud platform. So, how do businesses benefit from this AWS low-code / no-code offering?
AWS cloud infrastructure accounts for a majority of cloud usage across the globe. As most businesses run their cloud networks on AWS, it becomes easy for them to take advantage of low-code solutions. While developers use this platform to quickly build applications, business teams with zero coding knowledge can create their apps for day to day business activities. Low-code apps offer faster time to market, reduce development costs, HR-related costs, office footprint etc. It also helps businesses in dealing with the shortage of qualified software professionals.
UI / UX gets better with Infragistics
Low-code or no-code app development platforms focus on enabling users to quickly build apps without writing lengthy code. Regardless of the level of coding, users can quickly build apps using drag-n-drop tools. However, User interface (UI) and User experience (UX) has been a concern for businesses. Currently, low code platforms help you to convert your idea into a prototype while not concentrating on the user experience. Infragistics is now filling this gap.
Cross-platform UI/UX toolmaker Infragistics released a new product Infragistics Ultimate 21.1 on 17th June 2021 which aims to deliver the right UI/UX designs while building low-code apps. It helps business teams to build highly intuitive dashboards with the right UI/UX design. Currently, the IT industry is in shortage of experienced UI/UX professionals. The average salary of a UX designer in the US is $96,529 along with a cash bonus of $5000 per year, as reported by Indeed. San Francisco is the highest paying state for UX designers, paying $140,975 per annum. With Infragistics Ultimate 21.1, organizations can incorporate UI/UX designs into the apps using pre-built templates and tools. As such, businesses can save huge amounts on UI/UX professionals’ salaries while also overcoming the shortage of experienced UI/UX professionals. It also expedites software development projects. As such, businesses deliver a much better customer experience.
Looking at the entrance of IT giants into this segment, it becomes evident that low-code is not just a business hype but is delivering results. So, organizations need to tap these business benefits at the earliest.
Here are 5 important areas wherein businesses are making profits with low-code development:
BizDevOps
BizDevOps is a new buzzword in the development circles in recent times. Low-code app development extends DevOps, incorporating business staff into cross-functional teams to develop customer-centric apps. When a team has a clear understanding of the value stream of the project, customer end-to-end lifecycle, company strategy and business objectives, quality products are built faster and with reduced costs. Shadow IT can be effectively controlled.
Accelerate your Microservices Journey
As businesses are moving away from monolithic systems towards a microservices architecture, low-code app platforms accelerate this process by enabling you to quickly re-architect monolith functions into microservices via APIs. You can start with low-risk apps that highly impact your business processes.
Self-serving customer-centric portals
Business teams that are involved with customers know what customers need from a business. Searching for the company services, getting a quote, paying bills, getting an answer is a few of them. As such, business teams without coding knowledge can quickly build a self-serving web portal to address customer-specific needs. In addition, companies can quickly build a mobile app and serve customers.
Optimized Costs
Low-code / no-code app development platforms eliminate the need to hire expensive software engineers. With low-code platforms, you can quickly and cost-effectively build and deploy business applications with ease. Advanced features and integration tasks can be handed over to senior developers. That way, you can reduce the software team size and the office footprint. While it saves operational costs, you don’t have to go through the tedious hiring process. Bonuses, insurances and HR-related compliances can be avoided too.
Customer satisfaction is the key
Apps build on low-code platforms are highly customer-centric as they are built by people who interact with customers. Often, sales guys complain about the inefficient processes designed by IT teams that will make the customer leave away before closing a sale. When the sales guy creates the app, he knows what should be included and what shouldn’t. So, businesses can make more sales and generate revenues. More satisfied customers mean repeat business and new references as well.
Several companies have already started to benefit from low-code app platforms. What about your organization?
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.
Why CloudTern Chose Kubernetes for Container Orchestration?
In the traditional software development environment, creating an application was a simple process of writing the code. However, the rapid innovation that has brought-in a myriad of technologies, tools, frameworks, architecture and interfaces adds enormous complexity to application development environments. The advent of smartphones has opened up another world of mobile computing environment which adds up to this challenge. Developers now have to consider all these aspects while creating an application. Containerization solves all these challenges enabling developers to focus on just the application and not worry about runtime environment differences.
An Overview of Containerization
A container is a standalone and portable software unit that is packaged with code and its entire runtime environment such as binaries, libraries, dependencies, configuration files etc. By abstracting away the underlying infrastructure, OS and platform differences, containers facilitate seamless movement of applications between different computing environments. Right from a large enterprise application to a small microservice, containerization can be applied to any type of application or service. The absence of the OS image makes containers lightweight and highly portable.
The Evolution of Containerization
Containerization is not a new concept and has been around for decades. Unix OS Chroot was the first system that implemented containerization, providing disk space for each process. Derrick T. Woolworth extended this feature in 2000 wherein he added a sandboxing feature for file system isolation in FreeBSD OS. While Linux implemented this feature in its VServer in 2001, Solaris released containers for x86 in 2004. Similarly, Google introduced Process Containers in 2006 to isolate resources. Linux introduced container manager, LXC in 2008. CloudFoundry introduced LXC in Warden which was able to run on any operating system. Google introduced Linux app containers in 2013 which was called lmctfy. However, containerization gained widespread adoption with the advent of Docker in 2013.
Virtual Machines Vs Containers
Containers are often confused with virtual machines. Containers and virtual machines share a lot of similarities in terms of resource isolation and allocation but differ in the functionality. A virtual machine is created by abstracting physical resources from a machine and deployed to run in an isolated computing environment to deliver the functionality of a computing device. Each virtual machine contains the copy of the operating system and all the dependencies of the application running on it. A hypervisor is used to run multiple VMs on a single machine. As it contains the full copy of OS, it is larger in size and takes more time to boot.
While a VM virtualizes hardware resources, a container virtualizes the operating system. Multiple containers share the same OS kernel and run in isolation on the same machine. As there is no OS, containers are lightweight, portable, run more applications and take less time to boot. By combining both these technologies, organizations can gain more flexibility in managing and deploying a range of applications.
Benefits of Containerization
Containers bring amazing benefits to organisations. Here are a few of them:
Highly Portable
While the absence of a full OS copy in a container makes it light-weight, the abstraction of underlying infrastructure makes it highly portable. It means, containers can be easily deployed in an on-premise data center, public cloud or on any individual laptop. Containers run on Windows, MAC, Linux, virtual machines or even on bare metals, offering higher flexibility for development and deployment of applications.
Improved Efficacies and Increased Productivity
Containers clearly define the role of developers and operations teams. With language runtimes, software libraries and dependencies, containers assure predictable and consistent environments, regardless of where the applications run. As such, operations and development teams can stop worrying about software differences across environments and focus more on improving performance of apps, resulting in more productivity and efficacies.
Faster and Better Application deployment
Containerization significantly improves the build, test and deployment of applications. Compared to virtual machines that take minutes to load, containers can be spinned up within seconds. They share a single OS kernel, boot much faster and consume less memory. By packaging an app along with its dependencies into isolated software units, containers facilitate easy replication of apps on multiple machines across the clusters, rapid deployment and scaling.
Docker – A Synonym for a Container
Docker is an open-source tool that helps both development and operations teams in building, managing and deploying containers with ease. Docker was originally created for Linux but now supports MAC and Windows environments. Docker Engine is a runtime environment that lets you build and run containers and store these images in Docker Hub container registry.
As a leading cloud solutions company, CloudTern manages containerization needs for multiple companies. Docker offers the flexibility to integrate it with major infrastructure automation and configuration management solutions such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack etc. or independently manage software environments. In addition, Docker allows us to integrate it with the CI/CD pipeline and run multiple development environments that are similar to real-time production environments on a single machine or try different configurations, servers, and devices etc. for running test suites. As such, our clients were able to deploy software more frequently and recover faster while significantly reducing the change failure rate.
While there are other container management tools such as RKT, Canonical, Parallels etc., Docker is the most popular tool that has now become a synonym for a container. The fact that Docker can be used on any operating system or cloud makes it the first choice for many. At CloudTern, we proactively monitor technology changes and offer the best IT solutions for our clients. So, Docker is our first choice for all containerization needs.
Why Container Orchestration?
Looking at the significant benefits offered by containers, several organizations are now implementing container technology into their CI/CD environments. As containers are quick to spin up, lightweight and portable, thousands of containers are created and deployed across the infrastructure. A typical IT infrastructure runs hundreds of containers that come with a shorter lifespan which pose great complexity in infrastructure monitoring. You need to closely monitor and manage them to know what’s running on each server. This is where cloud orchestration tools come to the rescue.
Kubernetes, Mesosphere and Docker are the most popular cloud orchestration tools.
An Overview of Kubernetes
Kubernetes is the most widely used container orchestration tool in recent times. Kubernetes was developed by Google and released in 2014. It is now managed by Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes allows organizations to easily automate deployment, scaling and management of container applications across a cluster of nodes. It is a standalone software that can independently manage containers without Docker or work with Docker in tandem.
A Quick Overview of Kubernetes Architecture
The kubernetes architecture consists of two core components:
- Nodes (bare metals or virtual machines): Nodes are again divided into two components:
- Master: A master node is where the Kubernetes is installed. The Master node controls and manages scheduling of pods across worker nodes where the application runs while maintaining the state of the cluster at its predefined state. Multiple master nodes are implemented to maintain high availability. Here are the key components of a master node.
- Kube-contoller-manager: It is responsible to maintain the desired state of a cluster by listening to the kube-apiserver about the information of the current state.
- Kube-scheduler: It is the service that schedules events and jobs across the cluster based on the availability of resources of predefined policies via the kube-apiserver.
- Kube-apiserver: It is the API server that enables UI dashboards and CLI tools to interact with Kubernetes clusters.
- Etcd: It is the master node storage stack that contains definitions, policies, state of the system.
- Worker Node: This is where the actual application runs. It contains the following components:
- Docker: It contains the Docker engine to manage containers.
- Kubelet: It receives instructions from the master node and executes them while sending information about the state of the node to the master.
- Kube-proxy: This service facilitates communication between microservices and pods within the cluster as well as connect the application to the outside world.
- Master: A master node is where the Kubernetes is installed. The Master node controls and manages scheduling of pods across worker nodes where the application runs while maintaining the state of the cluster at its predefined state. Multiple master nodes are implemented to maintain high availability. Here are the key components of a master node.
- Pods: A pod is a Kubernetes basic unit of deployment. All containers required to co-exist will run in a single pod.
Why CloudTern Chose Kubernetes?
As a leading cloud managed Services Company, CloudTern handles cloud networks of multiple organisations. A typical IT network comprises multiple nodes that can be anything from virtual machines to bare metals. Multiple nodes are implemented by IT administrators for two important reasons. Firstly, high availability is a key requirement for cloud-based services wherein the application should always be available to users even when a node is down. So, a robust infrastructure has to be set up. Secondly, scalability is a key concern. As the application traffic increases, more containers should be dynamically added or removed on-demand. Multiple containers of an application should talk to each other as well.
Docker Swarm is a container orchestration tool offered by Docker. It uses Docker API and works in tight integration with Docker. However, CloudTern chose Kubernetes because Kubernetes efficiently co-ordinates a large cluster of nodes and scales better in production compared to Docker that runs only on a single node. It helps you manage and orchestrate container resources from a central dashboard.
Kubernetes securely manages networking, load-balancing and scales well. In addition, it allows you to group containers based on a criteria such as staging environments or implement access permissions. So, it eliminates the need to mock up the entire microservices architecture of an application for the development team. You can deploy software across pods in a scale-out manner and scale in deployments on-demand. It gives clear visibility into the deployment process wherein you can check the completed, in-process and failed deployments from a single pane. You can save time by pausing and resuming a deployment at your convenience. The version control feature allows you to update pods with latest images of the application and roll back to a previous one, if needed.
With support for 5000 nodes and 300,000 containers, Kubernetes works well for organizations of all sizes. Combined with Docker, Kubernetes offers a highly scalable cloud orchestration system delivering fast and reliable applications. Kubernetes enjoys a large and vibrant community which means you can always be up to date with what’s happening with the tool or get help to resolve any issues.
The Bottom Line
Kubernetes is not just a personal choice. Today, Kubernetes is the market leader in container orchestration. According to StackRox, Kubernetes market adoption reached 86% by Spring 2019. These market statistics once again affirm the fact that CloudTern always offers the right tools for the right IT tasks.
References
Digital BSS Overview
An Overview of Digital Business Support Systems (BSS)
Faster time to market is the main objective of digital transformation strategies of most organisations in recent times. With the digital innovation bringing agility and scalability into business processes, organisations are now able to quickly develop and deploy products. The communications industry is not excluded. While other industries are being able to quickly realign their business strategies to digitalize their offerings, the telecom industry faces several challenges on the roadmap to digital transformation. Legacy infrastructure, consolidation of back-end solutions that run on monolithic architecture and redundant systems, shrinking IT budgets are some of them. As customer demands are dynamically changing, businesses now need a dynamic solution that can digitalize their BSS.
The need for Digital BSS
Business support systems are the heart of any organization. In today’s fast-paced business world, having the best BSS is the key to successfully running any business. However, the rapid changing in technologies and customer behaviours have forced communication service providers (CSPs) to offer highly interactive and scalable BSS systems. With the Internet revolution that has been augmented with mobile and IoT, customer interaction modes have significantly changed. New interactive channels such as mobile apps, web and retail etc. and mode of communication such as emails, chats, social media and self-serving apps etc. are the need of the hour. Today, customers expect a quick, flexible and personalized interactive experience that is consistent and holistic across all channels. However, current BSS are bogged down with large monolithic architectures and traditional systems.
Adding to this challenge is the entrant of over-the-top (OTT) players and social networks such as Apple, Google and Facebook. As they offer video and voice calls, chats and other interactive channels that are easy, intuitive and fast, CSPs face a tough challenge in matching this agility. Secondly, there is a decline in voice revenues as data services are getting popular in recent times. To make up for this loss, CSPs are required to invest in new channels and upgrade existing networks while integrating them with existing BSS networks. The ever-increasing cloud solutions pose another challenge as they should be properly integrated into the existing infrastructure while streamlining the data warehousing infrastructure. A new digital BSS architecture is the answer.
Digital BSS Architecture
A digital BSS solution consolidates backend infrastructure, optimizes interoperability to offer a superior customer experience. At the heart of digital BSS sits the BSS API Framework. A Cassandra database can be used to facilitate faster data processing of thousands of requests per second. Complimented by the High Performance Data (HPD) Framework, the BSS API integrates all channels into a common information layer to deliver a unified communications system that is modular and highly scalable.
The BSS API Framework should support all types of APIs running on different domains. Whether you use a public API for externally processing applications or run a private API for communication between core components, Events API that update users with change in state or a data loading Import API, all APIs can seamlessly interact via the BSS API Framework.
A robust and comprehensive digital BSS should contain subsystems such as Product Order Management, Predictive Analytics, Revenue Management etc. for a comprehensive management of business processes.
Product and Order Management: It defines customer profiles from technical and commercial perspective enabling you to flexibly offer differential pricing with higher customer satisfaction while eliminating the need to manage multiple catalogues across the organization.
Revenue Management: For any business, revenue management is the key. A BSS revenue management subsystem offers a centralized billing system that allows you to manage billing, invoicing, collections etc. with business agility and centralized control, you can optimize costs and improve revenues.
Predictive Analytics: Closely monitoring changing technologies and customer trends, Predictive Analytics analyses business data and offers data-driven decision making systems.Predictive Analytics: Closely monitoring changing technologies and customer trends, Predictive Analytics analyses business data and offers data-driven decision making systems.
Similarly, you can add other sub-systems such as Intelligence Channel system that offers predictive customer service, Customer Profiling, Credit Decision Tool, Reporting & Analytics tool, Office management etc. An intuitive dashboard is a key component that allows you to monitor and manage entire BSS operations from a centralized dashboard. When rightly implemented, digital BSS solutions bring a new level of intelligence to your business processes.
The State of Digital BSS Market
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global digital market was valued at $2.8 billion in 2018. This value is expected to touch $5.8 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 15.2%. similarly, Transparency Market Research reports that the Operations Support System (OSS) and the BSS market which was valued at $29.11 billion in 2015 is expected to touch $70.97 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 10.5% during this period.
The Bottomline
The telecommunications industry is going through a digital transformation. Digital BSS solutions are poised to disrupt this space. Communication service providers that embrace this trend are going to stay ahead of competition. Ignoring this digital transformation will leave you out of business. The key here is to choose the right IT service provider to help you make a smooth transition to the digital BSS era.
Contact CloudTern right now to embrace the Digital BSS revolution!
Beacon technology for Asset Tracking
The advent of Internet of Things (IoT) has not only revolutionized IT networks but it also paved way for a range of new and innovative technologies. The beacon technology is one among them. Right from the time when Apple introduced the beacon technology in 2013 to till date, the technology has greatly evolved and is getting better every day. While the beacon technology was initially used by retail businesses, its functionality is now being extending to every field. Asset tracking with beacons is the new trend. Using the beacon technology, businesses are now able to implement cost-effective and highly scalable asset tracking solutions.
An Overview of Beacons
A beacon is a small Bluetooth-based device that is used to continuously transmit radio signals. This small form factor device contains a small radio transmitter and a battery. It uses the Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE) protocol to transmit data. As BLE consumes low energy, you can run beacons without draining out the battery. Depending on the size and functionality of the device, beacon batteries can last from 6 months to 5 years. However, it transmits low amounts of data which means you can’t transfer audio or streaming data.
The beacon technology is similar to Near-field Communication (NFC) technology. However, the difference lies in the range. While NFC functions within 8 inches, beacons can work within a range of 70 meters.
The State of Beacon Market
Beacons have become the first choice for many companies when it comes to Real-Time Location System (RTLS) solutions. According to Grandview Research, the global Bluetooth beacon market is expected to reach $58.7 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 95.3% between 2017 and 2025. Similarly, Allied Market Research reports that the global beacon market would reach $14.839 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 61.5% between 2018 and 2024. GM Insights reports that the market value of beacons was $170 million in 2016. This value is expected to grow at a CAGR of 80% between 2017 and 2024. The retail industry is the largest market for beacons followed by the health sector.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/827293/world-beacons-technology-market-revenue-by-end-user/
Analyst firm Statista reports that the global beacon market was valued at $519.6 million in 2016. This value is expected to reach $56.6 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 59.8% between 2016 and 2026.
The Technology behind Beacons
Beacons perform a single task. They just send a radio signal at pre-defined intervals. BLE-enabled devices such as smartphones receive these signals and act accordingly. Each beacon is assigned with a unique identifier. So, the device transmits this unique identifier which enables the receiver to identify the location of the beacon as well as the location of the user.
A beacon contains a small ARM (Advanced RISC machines) computer, Bluetooth connectivity module and a small battery. This small CPU runs the firmware written in low-level programming that controls the behaviour of the beacon. As the beacon’s job is to transmit its identifier, the small CPU power and battery is more than sufficient to process this data or encrypt the identifier. Inside the beacon you will find a small antenna that transmits electromagnetic waves. It uses the Bluetooth protocol. The latest Bluetooth standard is 4.2. The normal frequency of the beacon radio waves is 2.4 GHz and the maximum data limit for the 4.2 standard is 257 bytes. With such small amount of payload, beacons transmit the UUID, major, minor and the signal power. The receiving devices calculate the proximity of the beacon based on the transmitted signal power.
Beacon transmits the following components
Universally Unique Identifier (UUID): It is the unique identifier that differentiates your beacons from other devices outside your network.
Major Value: It is the unsigned integer value that tells you about the group in which the beacon is placed. For instance, beacons installed in the 1st floor will have the same major value. The value can be anything between 1 and 65535.
Minor Value: It is the unsigned integer that differentiates a beacon from a group. The value falls between 1 and 65535.
Here is an example of a UUID:
f626db6-3ga2-4e98-8013-bc5b71f0983c
When you talk about a beacon, you think about a physical device. However, some smartphones can act as a transmitter as well as a receiver. For instance, Apple doesn’t offer any physical beacon. It has incorporated the beacon technology into iOS 7 operating system. With more than 200 million iOS 7 devices in the market, Apple already has a considerable amount of beacons in the market.
How are beacons useful?
Beacons don’t relay any important message. They simply relay their IDs. It is the job of the receiver device to apply this information into a useful solution. For instance, a retail mall installs beacons inside the mall. When a customer visits the store and browses the electronic section of the mall, the beacon installed at that place will transmit its ID. The app in the smartphone of the customer will receive the ID and identifies the location of the customer. In this case, the app identifies that the customer is at the electronics section. So, the app will send discounts and offers related to the electronic products of that mall. Moreover, these offers would be specific and customized for that customer.
Asset tracking with Beacons
Asset tracking and management is a key requirement for any industry. Beacons can significantly reduce the cost and complexity of this job. There are multiple ways to track assets using beacons. For instance, you can mount BLE receivers in a permanent fixture and tag assets to beacons. When an asset comes into proximity of a BLE-enabled receiver, it tracks the movement via mobile data or Wi-Fi and logs the data. You can either take action or store the information for management and analytics purposes. Using beacons, you can cost-effectively track thousands of assets in real-time, 24/7.
There are instances wherein you cannot mount BLE receivers in permanent fixtures in temporary locations such as conference halls or function halls. In such cases, you can fix beacons in different places and track assets using a mobile app. By tagging assets to beacons, you can track each asset from the mobile app. Implementation is easy as there is no need for wiring or costly installation.
For more accuracy and maximum coverage, you can augment the beacon setup with additional receivers. You can install fixed beacons and fixed BLE receivers and augment them with moving beacons and moving BLE receivers. This setup can be extremely useful in low-signal areas such as ICUs of a hospital or a high-security airport check points. In areas such as large construction sites, environments quickly change. As such, you need a dynamic beacon architecture. In such cases, you can complement beacons with GPS and Wi-Fi. Depending on your environment, business type and requirement, you can choose the right deployment beacon technology.
Asset tracking with beacons is quickly gaining traction. Reports show that beacons have significantly reduced operational costs of asset management tasks. According to a Proximity Directory report, a total of 15,176,500 proximity sensors were installed globally in Q2, 2017. And, asset tracking with beacons is saving billions of dollars for the $9.1 billion logistics industry. Similarly, the health industry can save hundreds and thousands of dollars with an ROI of 275% by using asset tracking with beacons.
The advantages of beacons are enormous. Using beacons, you can track every item in the warehouse, track vehicles within the infrastructure, track equipment and machinery in a healthcare location, track luggage trolleys in airports, railway stations etc. In addition, you can track people/employees by giving them BLE-enabled devices.
Bluetooth 5.0 is offering additional capabilities in the form of 2x speed, 800% more broadcast messaging capacity and 4x range. As such, beacons are sure to disrupt the RTLS solutions in the coming days.
IoT with Private LTE Networks is disrupting the Industrial Vertical – Is your business ready for this innovation?
In Feb 2017, Qualcomm along with GE and Nokia announced a successful demonstration of private LTE for industrial IoT market which created a great buzz in the industrial IT circles. This team has conducted live field trails to continue the research based on this demonstration throughout 2017 by integrating their platforms and technologies. While Nokia provided the base infrastructure and the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud Service for a private network, Qualcomm offered the wireless connectivity with chipset devices and GE integrated these solutions onto its Industrial IoT platform Predix for a better control of industrial resources across the infrastructure. GE leverages the Predix platform with a private LTE network setup at GE headquarters. This demonstration brings private LTE networks into the limelight.
An Overview of LTE Networks
Long Term Evolution (LTE) is an innovative high-speed wireless network technology that comes with low latency and high speeds over long distances for data terminals and mobile devices via UMTS technologies. It was designed by 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP) as a 4G network communications standard to offer higher speeds for wireless networks; ten times faster than 3G networks. With IP-based voice, data and multimedia streams, LTE networks offer speeds between 10 Mbit per second and 1 Gbit per second and is easy to deploy and use. They can be deployed on different frequency bandwidth blocks. The current LTE networks support 1.4MHz, 3MHz, 5MHz, 10 MHz, 15MHz, and 20MHz. every 5MHz spectrum of each cell support around 200 active connections.
How does it work?
LTE uses two different air interfaces for downlink and uplink purposes. For the downlink from the tower to the device, LTE uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) air interface which allows multiple connections on a single cell and increased throughput of a connection. Similarly, for the uplink from the device to the tower, LTE uses Discrete Fourier Transform Spread Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (DFTS – OFDMA) air interface. With varying air interfaces for downlink and uplink, LTE networks optimize connections with better battery life for the devices.
LTE for Industrial IoT
LTE technology is not new but it gained momentum with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). While the cloud computing revolutionized the IT world and centralized resources, it paved a way for BYOD networks wherein mobile devices entered the network. The next big step was Internet of Things wherein sensors and other industrial devices joined the IT networks. With IoT, organizations are able to facilitate communication between a range of devices including IT and non-IT devices.
The main challenge for Industrial IoT is connectivity issues. More often, industrial companies have their temporary facilities located in remote places wherein reliable network connection is not easy to obtain. Whether it is an oil excavation site, mining site or a power plant, the regular network might provide basic connectivity but not the required speed and efficacy. As industrial infrastructure is now equipped with robotics, automated guided vehicle (AGV), drones, Augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR), high-speed and low latency data transfer becomes a critical requirement. The data should be stored locally while having a global access. Services should be interoperable. This is where LTE networks come to the rescue. The temporary industrial sites can set up a standalone LTE network and enjoy reliable and faster network connectivity for that facility.
The state of LTE Networks
Today, every cellular mobile device supports 4G LTE network. While AT&T and Verizon launched 4G LTE networks, others are quickly following them. According to ReportsandReports, the global investments in LTE networks accounted for $800 million in 2016. This value is expected to grow at a CAGR of 32% between 2016 and 2020. Persistence Market Research envisages that the global LTE networks market value would reach $926.1 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 13.1% between 2016 and 2024. Similarly, Harbor Research reports that the private LTE network would reach $17 billion by 2022.
Public LTE Vs Private LTE
Enterprises can either choose public or private LTE networks. When it comes to a public LTE offering, the network is managed by the service provider. While it gives wide-area coverage, it is also shared by other customers. Public LTE networks provide general voice and data services.
Private LTE networks bring additional benefits to the table. Firstly, private LTE networks come with dedicated equipment and are managed locally, giving better control over data. Moreover, there are no sudden traffic surges. With the consistent performance, industrial facilities can manage productivity at predictable levels. Secondly, private LTE networks are easy to deploy and use for dedicated as well as virtual resource-based infrastructure. Thirdly, private LTE networks offer dedicated service which means high-quality service is guaranteed along with the ability to customize the network to suit industrial-specific needs.
Benefits of Private LTE Networks
- Support multiple devices with higher bandwidth
- Customizable for features such as mobile settings and quality of service
- Highly secure
- Better control over data
- Future proof as you can leverage the LTE roadmap
- Superior coverage for indoors and outdoors
- Seamless mobility
- Interoperability between suppliers
Private LTE Networks take the Industrial IoT to a new horizon
As the IoT networks increased, the need for higher speed and coverage, full mobility, latency and quality of service became a critical requirement for industrial facilities such as airports, ports, container ports, warehouses etc. Qualcomm has partnered with GE and Nokia to create a unified communication network system. The result is the first Private LTE-based network for industrial IoT. By integrating all the devices in the network and bringing them onto an industrial OS Predix platform, organizations are now able to incorporate latest technologies such as machine learning, analytics, artificial intelligence and predictive maintenance to significantly improve the efficiency of business processes and services. Nokia takes the automation to a new level by offering a private plug n play LTE ecosystem. The wireless communication is managed by Qualcomm. Multefire is an LTE deployment initiated by Qualcomm and Nokia. It is now managed by Multefire Alliance that was formed in December 2015. Similarly, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the US has defined Citizen Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) that offers 150 MHz shared spectrum band in 5.5 GHz band. So, organizations have two solutions to cost-effectively own and manage their private LTE networks without purchasing spectrum licenses.
As private LTE networks bring low latency and high-speed wireless connectivity, industries can add more sensors, analytics and automation devices to efficiently manage business-critical procedures such as handheld computing, AGV, head mounted display, industrial robots, edge computing and analytics, interactive maintenance, environmental sensors, drone inspection, turbine and blade sensors etc..
Private LTE Use cases
Manufacturing Vertical
In manufacturing industries, welding robots are commonly used for welding and handling automobile parts on the assembly line. Synchronization between a robot and the assembly line sensor is critical for precision of a process. A small delay in communication will result in the collision between the robots that in turn collapses the entire assembly line processes. For this reason, many industries are running hard-wired connections that are expensive. Moreover, wired connections occupy more footprint and clog the area as well. With private LTE networks, organizations can operate with wireless robots and thereby save time, money and footprint.
Mining Vertical
In a mining location, people have to work in harsh and remote environments. While sophisticated and automated solutions are available, organizations cannot use them owing to the lack of proper communication systems for real-time data for remote vehicles, systems, and the monitoring center. With a private LTE network, organizations can replace regular vehicles with driverless vehicles so that they can quickly reach out to remote areas and precisely apply drill blast procedures. The mining operations can be efficiently monitored from a centralized dashboard.
Healthcare Vertical
Healthcare is one of the important verticals that hosts a large number of IoT devices ranging from scanners and X-Rays to clinical and biometric devices. However, healthcare organizations use Wi-Fi only because they are not able to choose one mobile service provider’s ratio for all devices. Obtaining FDA certification for all clinical devices is cumbersome. However, the CBRS LTE networks now allow organizations to choose a spectrum that is independent of a mobile service provider. Moreover, one FDA certification would work for any private LTE spectrum.
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
