Month: December 2017

3 Techniques that Minimize Downtime

Posted on by Mario

downtime

Since users keep on expecting a stable and reliable service, many web developers and system admin attempt to create infrastructures that are more reliable and able to minimize downtime. In fact, minimizing downtime is necessary for increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing support request. Below, we provide you with three areas that are crucial when it comes to downtime and we also offer some improvements that you can apply on them. Check this out!

  1. Monitoring and Alerts

Nothing works better than properly monitoring your infrastructure. In this way, you can discover any issues before they really appear and affect your customers.  Furthermore, monitoring infrastructure will also aggregate and retain a record of stats such as application performance metrics, and system resource utilization. So, the main purpose is to look for anything weird.

Usually a client is interacted on each host that collects metrics for monitoring, and then reports back to a central server. These metrics will be stored in a database and available for many services like searching, alerting, and graphing. Fortunately, there is software that can help you monitor your infrastructure, such as:

  • Graphite

Graphite provides an API that has the support of dozens of applications and programming languages.  On the other hand, metrics are pushed, stored, and graphed in the central Graphite installation.

  • Prometheus

To pull data from a variety of community supported and official clients, you can use Prometheus. It has an alerting system that is built-in and is highly scale able. Besides, it comes with client libraries for several programming languages.

  1. Software Deployment Improvement

Believe it or not, software deployment strategies are one area that plays an important role on your downtime. Unfortunately, many people often overlook it.

Bear in mind that having a complex deployment process will result in the production environment leaving the development environment behind. This can cause any risky software releases since every deployment is a much larger set of changes that naturally brings a much higher risk of problem arising. No wonder this process can easily lead to numerous bugs that can slow down development and cause the unavailability of resources.

Therefore, the best solution for this situation is to set up some up-front planning. In order to sync your production environment with your development environment, you have to figure out a strategy that allows you to automate the workflow, code integration, deployment, and testing.

Here are some best practices regarding the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) and testing the software that help you start automating deployments:

  • Maintaining a Single Repository

To make sure that every person on the development team works on the same code and can test their changes easily, you can maintain a single repository.

  • Automating Testing and Build Processes

Don’t forget to automate your development and testing as this will simplify deployment in an environment similar to the final use-case. Besides, you will find it helpful, especially when debugging platform-specific issues.

  1. Implementing High Availability

Another strategy that you can apply to minimize downtime is to use the concept of high availability on the infrastructure which includes principles used in designing resilient and redundant systems.

In this case, the system should be able to detect and analyze the health of the system; it has to know precisely where the error is located. Furthermore, the system must be able to redirect traffic as this can help minimize downtime through reducing interruption.

In order to upgrade to a highly available infrastructure, you have to move to multiple web servers and a load balancer from a single server. The load balancer will show you regular health checks on web servers and routes traffic from those servers that are failing.

Moreover, you can also add resilience and redundancy to increase database resilience using database replication; surely, you will find different database models on different configurations of replication. However, many believe that group replication is the most interesting one, as you can read and write operations on a redundant cluster of servers. In this way, you can detect any failing servers and routing done to prevent downtime.

In conclusion, there are three areas that can lead you to less downtime. If you truly put attention on them, you will have happier clients and of course this will lead you to more revenue.

5 Crucial Web Design Tips for a Professional Site

Posted on by Mario

Design requires a good taste of art; therefore, in order to succeed, one cannot compel their styles to users. In fact, a website designer needs to know what kind of styles that can fit to any website’s user experience and functionality at their first glance. This is where the challenge comes as how will we understand each person style. There are at least 5 crucial design tips that you can follow in order to create a professional site that may fit to general users.  Here they are.

Keep your Homepage Minimalistic and Free of Clutter

Have you ever noticed that instead of reading every word on a website, we quickly scan pages, picking out keywords and sentences? Concerningthis behavior, it’s better to approach users through their emotion than word count. Therefore, when users are less likely to look at your site, that means, you have provided a good explanation about what is able to process and evaluate. Even though text in calls to action is still necessary, to make users  feel easier in understanding what you want them to do, you’d better break them up with larger subheadings and legible paragraphs. Besides, you can also use images or icons as another way to communicate your point without the need of having too many words.

Design with Visual Hierarchy in Mind

As a designer, your job is not only creating a beautiful design, but you also have to arrange content in a clear manner. This is because we have lesser time to grab someone’s attention and explain them about your site. By establishing a clear hierarchy to your information, readers will automatically follow the plot you have created for them. For Further accentuation, you can apply color, contrast, size and spacing. These elements will also highlight the drawing attention on your page and making sure that it’s always intentional.

Furthermore, you can also use strips as one of the best designs for creating a strong visual hierarchy. In addition, strips will also help organize your website into clear, digestible pieces of content.

Create Easily Readable Website Content

One of the main characteristics of website users is that they don’t want to put much effort in understanding what you want to convey. Therefore, it is important to assess your content “readability” as it will measure how easy people will recognize words, sentences, and phrases. If your content readability is good, users will be able to efficiently scan your site and take in the information in the text without much effort.

If you want to improve your website readability, you can follow these steps:

  • A good Contrast

To have a good readability, your text and its background should have sufficient contrast so that it will be clear to see. The main idea is never sacrifice readability for creativity.

  • Be wise in choosing a font

In the early times, websites used small fonts, but over time, many people realize that it is difficult for people to read 12pt fonts when a screen is 24 inches from someone’s face. Now many designers prefer to use 16pt as a font standard. However, the number might be different, depending on which font you’re using, as some fonts have so many details that make it more difficult to read. In fact, there are some fonts that are actually suitable for online readers, such as Times New Roman, and many others. Avoid using script fonts that have so many cool fancy curves and stuff, but this font will hurt your visitors’ eyes.

  • Be Careful with Using too Many Fonts

It is better to use three or less fonts rather than use more than three different typefaces throughout a single website, as using too many fonts will risk the overall effects look cluttered. So, make sure you make the fonts look harmonious instead of cluttered.

Create an Easy to Navigate Site

Bear in mind that a designer should create a design that helps visitors. Therefore, do not send your visitors into a wild forest where they don’t have anywhere to go. A site which is equipped with a solid navigation helps search engines index your content while improving the viewers’ experience.

Here are some tips for creating good navigations’ experience:

  • Link your logo to your homepage; it is a traditional way to save your visitors some precious clicks.
  • Place your menu on the top or in the header of your website and structured according to the importance of each section.
  • You can apply some vertical navigation, such as anchor menu; this will work best on your site, especially if your site is of the long scrolling variety.
  • Don’t ignore your footer even though it is probably the last thing to be seen on your site since you can put so many information on it, such as placing links, a shortened version of your menu, social icons and additional important links that your visitors may need.

Stay Mobile Friendly

Since everybody is going mobile, it is important to design a website which is mobile friendly. A mobile friendly design should enable visitors to access your website on the go. Furthermore, the main key to design for mobile users is to put your position in the position of the user, and test out every page of user action and button.

By carefully applying the tips above, you can produce website designs that are not only beautiful but also functional. So, make sure you remember the tips above when designing for a website. However, if you find any difficulties while designing for your website, you can ask web designers to help you build a better design.

8 Brilliant Tips for Developing the Applications for Internet of Things

Posted on by Mario

Important Tips for Developing the Application for the Internet of Things_YWF

Before we go deeper with IoT, it is imperative to understand what Internet of Things (IoT) actually is. Basically, a platform enables the network, the smart device and user to get connected with the internet via a definite identifier. In general, IoT works on an embedded technology to communicate with all external environments. No wonder this thing has been seen as one of the revolutionary mobile app development trends in this generation, as it can manage everything right from an array of cohesive events to number of interconnected devices.

In fact, many have predicted that 2 billion devices will get connected to IOT by 2020, whereas the next five years $6 trillion is expected to be invested in IoT. This shows that Internet of Things have influenced a diverse set of industries to speak of, including the healthcare sector, the entertainment and gaming, automotive, home automation, and logistics. This is why IoT has a great potential in the future.

The Three Pillars of IoT

There are three major pillars which are important to note, regarding to the entire structure of the Internet of Things, such as:

  • Network: Generally network will perform similar function like router does in connecting the network to device. In this case, the devices are linked to the cloud. The infrastructure stationed at data centers will receive information. The things provide the data stream and also manage it. On the other hand, software helps to organize the things.
  • The things in themselves: it acts as Internet Gateway which is regarded as an Internet Gateway that helps other device communication through a single or many protocols. In fact, you won’t see a screen once the device gets connected to the network.
  • The cloud: it is a server that primarily aims for securing users confidential data. So, when users meet a critical juncture, the data will still get processed whereas the processing of a program usually happens during the concluding stages.

Tips for Developing Applications for IoT

Now, you have a better understanding about IoT and you may have lots of apps for the Internet of Things in mind. However, before you create one, you may want to know some factors that you can use as consideration, such as:

  1. Choose an Appropriate and Convenient Platform

The first step that every developer should do is to select the appropriate platform for the development process. One thing for sure, the platform should support the IoT applications and its components. Some platforms that are IoT proven and offer the scope to design the best in class apps are Ubidots, Xively or Thingworx. With the help of these platforms, you don’t have to start anything from the beginning.

  1. Consider the Industry for IoT Application

As stated above that Internet of Things has much widened and extended services, but there are still some fields that aren’t connected with Internet of Things. Therefore, you have to discover set of industries that can optimally connected such as healthcare, transportation, energy resources, sports, manufacturing etc. For instance, with IoT application, people can easily find transportation such as connecting buses or trains.

  1. Segregate Services from API Interface

Bear in mind that you need to separate the services from API interface while you are developing the apps for IoT. This will ensure you to have an app that runs smoothly on mobile and web desktop. You will surely get better opportunity once you manage your IoT applications well.

  1. IoT Data must be Secured Strongly

Every application developer knows about how important a strong secured environment is, especially to IoT data from the physical attacks. In fact, the security becomes more important when it comes to building GPS networks or banking apps.

  1. The Different Levels of IoT Apps

In order to understand the system and function of IoT applications, you have to know the various levels of IoT applications. Basically, there are four different layers; the devices, the ingestion tier, the analytics area and the end-user.

First of all, you have to consider the devices that you will be connecting. Then, you will see the infrastructure or the software receives data or organizes it. The next layer is all about data which actually is mainly processed with the help of analytics area. The last layer is about the end users for whom the app is getting developed.

  1. Keep an Eye on IoT Device Firmware Security

The difference between the Internet of Things from the traditional web and mobile apps is its hardware which is always apprehended to have security based issues in the firmware this is why it is essential to stay authenticated and signed before the update.

  1. Do not Neglect with Speed and Quality

You cannot comprise with the speed and quality at any cost when creating application for the IoT. Therefore, you have to focus on transforming the ideas into practice and provide stable working prototype.

  1. Ensure Scalability to the Application

It is important to build scalable applications since IoT is still a new concept. However, many believe that IoT is going to get bigger than ever with the time to arrive. In fact, having a good scalability will allow your app to remain in light for a long period of time.

In conclusion

Internet of Things is still considered as new comer in the technological area, but we will immediately see it is expanding and reached to a different height. This will surely help people access information easily and get connected one to each other at a  low price. On the other hand, it is also a challenge for the developers as it is different from other conventional methods.