Cloud Development – All You Need to Know
In today’s cloud era, every IT resource is hosted in the cloud and delivered over the Internet via a pay-per-use subscription model. While the amazing benefits offered by the cloud have inspired the software industry to embrace cloud development, the recent pandemic has forced everyone to move towards the digital world. As work-from-home environments are here to stay, cloud development has now become more important than ever.
What is Cloud Development?
Cloud development is about developing software applications using computing infrastructure that is hosted in the cloud. Instead of building and managing your servers and physical hardware, you can access technology services hosted in the cloud via a pay-per-use model.
Right from servers, data storage and network resources to OS, Middleware and Run-time environment, everything can be accessed over the Internet.
In addition, you gain access to ready-made cloud solutions for monitoring, analytics etc. Amazon is a leading provider of public cloud solutions while VMware tops the private cloud services segment.
Cloud-based apps are highly scalable and flexible. They can be accessed from any device, any location using APIs. The app data is stored in the cloud and resides on the user’s device as a cache enabling the user to work offline. When the app is connected online, the cache data gets updated. Google Docs, Evernote, Canva, Dropbox are a few popular examples of cloud-based apps.
Why is Cloud Development Popular?
Cloud development offers amazing benefits to organizations. Firstly, it eliminates the need to invest heavily in on-premise infrastructure and licensing costs. With a pay-per-use model, you can only pay for the services used. It gives you access to cutting-edge technologies at cost-effective prices. Secondly, cloud development facilitates seamless collaboration between teams located in different geo-locations. Thirdly, cloud development offers high scalability, flexibility, unlimited storage, faster time to market and automatic recovery options. In addition, it automatically updates the software and performs maintenance which means you can focus on building quality software products.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform are the leading providers of cloud development solutions.
Web Apps are not Cloud Apps
Often, cloud development is confused with web development. It is important to understand that all cloud apps are web apps but all web apps are not cloud apps. To be precise, cloud-based apps are an advanced version of web-based apps. Web-based apps depend on browsers and scalability and customization is limited. The data is stored on a single data server. You can’t work offline with web-based apps. On the other hand, cloud apps are highly scalable and customizable. The data is stored across multiple data-centers using replication techniques and you can work offline as well.
Cloud Development Challenges
While cloud development seems a great option, it comes with certain challenges. Cloud development demands seamless collaboration between different teams such as developers, designers, QA managers, data analysts, DevOps engineers etc. The project involves different cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure, GCP etc. So, people working on cloud apps should have good knowledge about various platforms and be able to integrate apps with different services using APIs.
Secondly, cloud development brings security concerns. As such, security should be implemented right into the CI/CD pipeline so that it can become a part of automation. It is recommended to separate app data from app architecture code. Thirdly, cloud development offers higher scalability. However, scalability that is not optimized will overrun your cloud budgets. As such, it is important to have clear network visibility to gain better control over cloud infrastructure.
Conclusion
Mobility solutions, disaster recovery, Flexibility and reduced workloads are some of the key drivers to cloud adoption. However, cloud development requires expert knowledge of cloud technologies. When rightly implemented, cloud development improves your operational efficiencies and optimizes costs while improving user experience.
Top 5 benefits of cloud-based software development in 2021
The advent of cloud computing technology has disrupted the technology world. Today, it is a challenge to identify a service that is not delivered over the cloud.
While every industry benefitted from this technology trend, the software segment was one of the first industries that started leveraging this trend. The buzz around cloud-based software development is increasing year after year.
2021 is not going to be any different. Together with AI, cloud technology is helping businesses deliver quality products that are transforming the world.
Here are the top 5 benefits of cloud-based software development in 2021.
1) Operational Efficiency at its best
While enterprises have the budgets and expert staff to use a technology stack that comprises cutting-edge technologies, small and medium companies have to adjust with legacy tools. However, cloud solutions bring everyone onto the same ground. With minimal investment, you can lay hands on world-class technology solutions to increase efficiencies and be competitive.
Another significant benefit of cloud-based software development is fast and automated deployments. Developers can build continuous integration (CI) / Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines and automate the entire process to easily build and deploy applications. Similarly, cloud-based apps can be effectively monitored. Based on predefined KPIs, you can analyze the performance of each application using cloud-based monitoring tools. The server logs help you identify issues and improve the efficiency of the product.
2) Mobility at its best
One of the biggest advantages of cloud-based software development is mobility. Regardless of your location, platform or device, cloud resources can be accessed by every authorized user 24/7. While the software team can remotely work on the product, endusers can access it from anywhere, anytime. Not only does it facilitate seamless collaboration between different teams, but it increases productivity as well. Considering the post-covid lockdown situations, mobility solutions have become a key requirement of every software development project in 2021.
3) Adaptability at its best
When it comes to cloud technology, innovation happens at a rapid pace. Today’s innovation can become tomorrow’s legacy. As such, businesses should proactively monitor technology trends and quickly incorporate necessary changes to their existing technology stack. Being future-proof is the key to sustaining your business operations. Cloud-based software development offers the flexibility to quickly realign product architecture and stay ahead of the competition.
4) Cost-optimization at its best
Cost savings is a huge benefit offered by cloud-based software development. You don’t need to invest in expensive physical hardware and licensing fee. You don’t need to worry about maintenance and updates as well. Right from provisioning the infrastructure to maintenance and security, the cloud provider handles all infrastructure-related tasks. It means you can quickly start delivering quality products. Cloud solutions are delivered via a pay-per-use subscription model. This feature enables you to dynamically scale up resources. Moreover, a lesser carbon footprint means a better world.
5) Scalability at its best
In a software development project, different teams have different resource requirements. For instance, developers require demo production environments to check the performance of a product. When you set up physical infrastructure, scaling up resources becomes expensive and time-consuming. Cloud infrastructure enables you to instantly scale up resources while only paying for the resources used. Similarly, Ops teams can ramp up production during peak hours and scale down during odd hours. The most important thing is that scaling can be automated.
However, it is important to consider that cloud-based software development is not easy compared to traditional software development. Security and privacy have to be prioritized. The lack of expert staff can be a big challenge for companies in fully leveraging this trend. When rightly done, cloud-based software development in 2021 keeps your business future-proof.
Top 10 Myths about Software Product Development
As businesses are embarking on the digitalization journey, software solutions have become a central point of all business operations.
According to Grand View Research, the business software and services market earned a revenue of $389.86 billion in 2020. This value is expected to grow at a CAGR of 11.3% between 2021 and 2028.
Right from the time when FORTRAN was released in the 50s, the software industry has been a favourite vertical for many.
At the same time, several myths and misconceptions are floating around this space.
Here are the top 10 myths about software product development.
1) The Most Popular Language is the Best One
Each developer has a favourite programming language and obviously, it will be the one that he is working on. The general notion is that the most popular programming language is the best in the business. However, it is not true. Different languages serve different purposes. You can’t rank one over the other. While choosing a programming language, consider certain aspects such as business requirements, existing technology stack, developers’ expertise, license and usage costs etc.
2) Coding Knowledge is enough to Build a Product
Most novice and inexperienced developers believe that coding knowledge is enough to build a product. While it is true that you need to learn the code to build a product, software development is not just about knowing how to write the code. You need to have domain knowledge, understand the subject area, think from a customer/user perspective etc. You should be able to think beyond the IT space.
3) Software Development is Expensive
Considering the fact that software engineers are highly paid in the industry, small and medium businesses tend to purchase generic software instead of choosing custom application development. However, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution doesn’t suit today’s dynamically changing IT era. When business and user requirements change, realigning IT solutions to meet these needs becomes a challenge. Moreover, when the company grows, you’ll have to rewrite the software.
4) Latest Tools are not always the Best
Often, people believe that using the latest cutting edge tools will make their technology stack robust, powerful and efficient. However, it is not always true. The criteria in choosing a software tool should be the performance, functionality, features, being future-proof, adaptability etc. and not on its popularity. If the tool is not backward-compatible, you’ll have to rewrite your app every time there is an update to the code. So, popularity is not a silver bullet.
5) More People in the Team means Faster Time to Market
In today’s fast-paced world, businesses are required to deliver products faster. As such, people tend to hire more developers to quickly get the work done. Especially, organizations hire more software engineers when the project fails to meet the deadlines. However, adding software engineers to the team doesn’t always expedite the process. It can sometimes become a bottleneck, owing to communication and collaboration issues. A better way is to streamline and orchestrate operations, design the right CI/CD pipelines, apply automation etc.
6) The Project is Done once it goes Live
A software product development project involving various phases such as planning, design and development, testing and deployment. A common notion is that the project is done once the app is uploaded to the app store. However, it is not true. Once the app is available for users, you should monitor the performance, collect feedback and apply changes and updates as and when required. When you don’t update the app for a long time, it might get removed from the app store. In today’s customer-centric product environment, a software engineer job will end only when the app ceases to exist for users.
7) Remote Software Development is Expensive
One common myth in software development circles is that outsourcing software development projects to remote teams incur huge expenses. When you outsource a project to a 3rd party, you will get access to highly experienced professionals. At the same time, you don’t have to deal with the complex hiring process, HR issues, insurance, labour benefits etc. It means you will get the best talent and only be paying for the technical expertise while receiving a quality product in return. The key here is to choose the right outsourcing company for your IT needs.
8) Agile development methods are Complex to Handle
While the IT world is rapidly innovating, agile and DevOps methodologies are becoming an inevitable option. However, some organizations are apprehensive to embrace these methods as they feel it will be difficult to manage cross-functional teams. Implementing a cultural change across the organization is another challenge. So, they continue with the waterfall development process. While the waterfall method seems easy at the beginning, you will end up struggling with flexibility, adaptability, mobility and UI/UX issues once the app is launched.
9) Quality Tools build Quality Products
Often, people believe that choosing a high-quality tool will help them to build a quality product. However, the quality of the product doesn’t depend only on a tool but requires critical thinking, analysis, project planning, communication and collaboration and coding skills etc. Choosing the right tool makes your job easier.
10) Outsourcing is a one-stop solution for all IT problems
Outsourcing is a popular method for organizations to get things done. However, a popular myth is that outsourcing is a one-stop solution for any IT problem and it solves all issues which is not true. Outsourcing is basically done so that the organization can focus on their core processes while the outsourced company handles their IT needs. However, outsourcing comes with its challenges. It is important to choose the right engagement model. When you choose a fixed price model, you might experience service level issues and quality issues. Choosing a dedicated team model is good but it again depends on the company that you select for that project.
Conclusion
Software development is a popular industry that is always evolving. Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s legacy. So, organizations should proactively monitor IT trends and customer requirements and adapt them quickly. Businesses that take application development seriously are sure to surge ahead of the competition.
Top 5 Things to Know before Starting Product Engineering
As businesses are transitioning from a product-driven business model towards a customer-centric development approach, product engineering is rapidly gaining prominence in recent times.
Product engineering services integrate software development services with product management, enabling organizations to align user requirements and user experience with business requirements and objectives while optimizing costs.
As your products define your company, it is essential to implement product engineering in the right way to build quality products faster and better.
Here are top five things to know before starting product engineering.
1) Product Engineering Roles and Responsibilities
Before jumping onto product development, it is critical to understand the difference between product engineering and product development. Though both terms look similar from a general perspective, they differ in roles and responsibilities. While product development is a broader term that involves every phase of the product lifecycle, product engineering is part of this product development that combines software engineering and product management. Be it an app, software or a business system, the role of a product engineer is to cost-effectively design a customer-centric product, implementing the right technology stack and methodologies while aligning them with business objectives and goals. It involves planning, design, development, testing, deployment and sustainable maintenance of the product.
2) Full-Stack Engineer is Different from a Product Engineer
Often, a full-stack engineer is confused with a product engineer. A full-stack engineer is responsible for developing the back-end and front end systems and integrating them via APIs. However, their role is limited to managing software, tools and human resources within specific work frames. However, product engineers have a broader role to play, from designing and deploying the product to ensuring that customers are satisfied with the product. When you clearly identify this thin line and rightly define roles and responsibilities, product engineering becomes efficient, easy and cost-effective.
3) The Importance of the Right Product Development strategy
Product engineers are responsible for delivering a quality product while considering development timelines and budgets. So, defining the right strategy for product development is the key. Firstly, consider the operational aspect of the product such as its efficiency, consistent performance, security, usability and costs etc. Secondly, mobility is a key requirement in today’s cloud and mobile era. So, consider portability, adaptability, reusability and interoperability. Thirdly, a modular design offers flexibility, self-repairing/self-healing and scales easily. You can easily perform maintenance tasks. With the right development strategy in place, the project becomes easily manageable.
4) Drive Innovation with Calculated Risks
Innovation is a key ingredient of a product that not only adds value to the product but also helps you to sustain the competition. However, innovation comes with certain risks. So, researching, collecting and analysing relevant data, analysing the future functionality of the product, identifying market gaps in that area and coming up with the feasibility of the product is recommended. Before moving ahead with the development, it is important to document specifications requirements. It can be done during the time of preparing a roadmap and designing the architecture of the product.
5) Seamless Collaboration across Teams
When it comes to product development, different teams have different goals and metrics. Product engineers envisage a product that scores high in quality, usability and durability while delivering better functionality. On the other hand, designers are concerned about the aesthetics and appearance of the product. Delivering a higher user experience is their key requirement. While developers love adding more features, the network guys are against it. Their motto is that fewer changes mean more stability. As such, collaborating with various teams and coming up with a common plan helps you strike the right balance between features, design and stability and expedite the product while increasing the quality as well.
The business world is rapidly evolving, putting constant pressure on product development teams. Today, businesses should proactively monitor changing market trends and realign their IT solutions accordingly. Product engineering services help you to cost-effectively build quality products faster while ensuring higher customer satisfaction. Businesses that ignore product engineering are sure to stay out of competition.
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.
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