I am a beginner trying to understand why do I or others need heroku or other cloud services for application development. I want to know for what sort of applications or scenarios, do we need heroku or similar services?
For example, if I am an application developer, I can write my application (windows or linux) on my machine, run and test it on my machine and then share it publicly on sourceforge.net or some other website for free or for some money. I mean all of us download and run applications and programs from all over the web e.g., notepad++ or skype. They come as binaries and we can install them on our machines easily. I want to know where Heroku or cloud comes into the picture and do I/we need it? and why?
Please let me know if you need more explanation.
Heroku and Other PaaS providers helps you in application deployment and gives hosting of your application and some other features like High availability, scaling, load balancing, monitoring and ready made environment to run your apps.
Now why they cost? PaaS providers runs your application on virtual instance and use some management and deployment tool in front of it to manage and monitor your application that taken care for you. Manging a server is not easy now a day for big application, you need a high level of expertise and enough time to monitor periodically(may be hours). If you go for free hosting, you will not get all these feature of PaaS. Again it's your choice. If you can't bear down time and any data lose, you should prefer PaaS else you can go for Free hosting.
First of all notepad++ is not an application users of which need to interact or share. So it is not a good choice for to give an example. Heroku and other cloud providers host cloud applications. Generally, these applications, as part of their nature, need scaling. And scaling requires more hardware. Setting up hardware to scale your application requires time, money and expertise, so it is expensive. Buying these as a service is more appropriate for most people. I would offer you to read about IAAS, PAAS, SAAS concepts to start.
For a beginner or an individual hobbyist, the charm of Heroku or a similar PaaS lies in the fact that Heroku (and others) do away with the complexity of building and deploying cloud/web/saas software.
A typical app developer just knows/needs to know about his/her app. That is it. Why should you have to worry about how many machines you need to run your app on or get charged for machine time when you are sipping coffee and your app isn't doing anything or you are just trying out new things and don't know if it works. You can just write code and push your app to Heroku (or other platforms like it) and let them worry about things like servers, availability and reliability of your app. Yes, you will need to make some simple choices but those are much simpler choices than planning for scalability or database backup. And like any software platform, you will learn with time as to what suits your needs best. You adjust your app and things work fine. And remember you pay only for what you use and that can go up or down when you do more or less with the platform.
Also, if your app turns out to be a really popular app and you need to scale the app to support your newly founded fame :), you can ramp up your infrastructure on the fly for some affordable price.
Related
I have to say I am fairly new to CI/CD and how to automatically update softwares.
I am developping a monitoring software for industrial customers. We have come to the point where we need to think about an updating strategy to make it easier to deploy our newest version to customers. However, my knowledge on the matter is quite poor and I don't really know where to start.
Our main idea is to have some sort of launcher where, on startup, the software detects that a new version is available and asks the customer if he wants to download it. The problem is that I don't know where to start to put in place that strategy.
Prior to my researches, I had come accross kubernetes, docker, Jenkins, and GitLab but can't figure out if they do actually what I want. Furthermore, I have looked at Microsoft's Configuration Manager but it seemslike you can only update softs that are on your network.
Feel free to ask for any info.
Thank you in advance for your help ! :)
We have an existing cross-platform Mobile Application, that also has an accompanying web application, that uses AWS as a back end (RDS for Database, Four server instances, and a Load Balancer to distribute traffic). APK and IPA files are packaged and sent to the stores, while components are retrieved from our server per request, which enables us to reduce the number of store builds, and make the process easier for getting changes out to clients.
We are at the stage of Development that we need to move to another platform to better facilitate our fast growing client base.
Due to the conditions upon our clients, these things must be considered.
must be cross platform (Android / iOS).
must be offline based (users need to be able to access without an internet connection)
must be able to sync with an existing database when there is a connection
requires Authentication
Cloud based (? may not be the right term, but meaning the ability for us to store components on a server and have a device check for updates and download a local copy - enabling us to work and distribute fixes faster)
Ideally compatible with AWS
We are currently looking at Xamarin to facilitate us for this move, however there is a lot of documentation and plugins out there to do all sorts of different things.
As developers, we all have some .net / c# experience, however none particularly with Xamarin.
We have a particular timeline that we need to adhere to (and need to ramp up in the next couple of weeks), and right now are essentially stuck in Limbo in a research phase, as we can't afford to get some things right. We are unable to move forward until we know Xamarin (or some other framework) is able to do everything that we need it to do.
It's hard to escape from the 'code it all ourselves' mentality - especially as we don't know where to start looking in terms of third party packages for Xamarin, and their documentation itself.
A lot of documentation mentions various systems of Azure - we would not be against moving to Azure over AWS if it _had to be done*, but because of the existing infrastructure with AWS - staying with AWS is obviously the preferred option (users need to access the current system whilst we build the new system)
This stack overflow post is to ask for recommendations, comments, or other observations on anything and everything involved with the process in regards to choosing frameworks, design patterns, methodologies, third party packages, etc.
Obviously we would like to use best practises for everything moving forward for optimum scalability and cleaner, more robust code. It's just hard to know where to start!
Any input will be highly appreciated.
Cheers!
edit: I am aware that this is 'asking for recommendations' which is 'specifically off-topic'. I have read the posting guidelines about open ended discussion, and am quite confident that this case is different. There is an underlying problem here, in that we are seeking advice on combinations of frameworks and plugins that are fully compatible with all of the items in the list (above)
Let's try to breakdown each of your requirement and constraint mentioned in the question.
1. You need a offline first architecture (With Sync mechanism)
Xamarin + Azure would make a good comdo for you, as it would support offline storage out of box (With a simple PullAsync call).
Albeit there are AWS SDK available for Xamarin. Here it goes http://docs.aws.amazon.com/mobile/sdkforxamarin/developerguide/setup.html
So the call is yours. There are few other ways to achieve caching offline storage in Xamarin, you can build upon those strategy in your logic. Alternatively there is a very interesting C# library Akavache for caching and offline storage.
2. OAuth 2.0 Authentication
Xamarin has a very good library named Xamarin.Auth. Though I would not say it is very easily extendible at this but there has been some serious work going on from Xamarin on this library.
But I would say it is very easy to use. The apps I have developed so far that includes - Google OAuth, Facebook integration, Microsoft account integration. It worked fine for all of them.
3. Cloud based distribution
There are nice tools available with Microsoft. Which makes the distribution easy. Have a look at https://mobile.azure.com . Also hockeyApp is good for distribution I found.
Where to start:
A very good starting point for you would be https://channel9.msdn.com . Just go there search with keyword "Xamarin" and view some videos. May be all these cross platform dynamics will be much easier for you.
Overall I found Xamarin a cool product to work with. Because anything that can be done in native Objective C/Swift or Java can very well be done in Xamarin using C#.
There are several tools that help to analyze the users behavior on your website. I would tend to divide them into ones that live on an own platform and which can be accessed through and API (like Google Analytics) and that ones that are to be installed on your own server (like Piwik).
I will launch a new web project soon, which requires such a tool and thus I wonder which one I should use. In my case I need to collect the data on my own server, so I will have to stick with the second type of tools. After playing around a little bit on my beta server I considered Piwik to be pretty nice to personalize, but until now, I had issues to set up piwik on the production server, because it is a windows server and the piwik version that is available at the webapp installer platform of windows server requires a different php version.
Installing Piwik on another - let's say - analytics server, is not an option for me, because I don't want to create all this https traffic, just because I am not able to set it up on my production server. And I also don't want to purchase another https certificate ;-).
I browsed the Windows Webapp Installer Platform in hope of something that just works out of the box in Windows. Similar questions like this also propose Google Analytics or Piwik. But this cannot be it, can it?
So..
Is there a tool which all you Windows Server people use?
Are there other tools that are used frequently?
Or even: Is it somehow possible to set up Piwik on a Windows Server without using The windows Web App Installer? I posted a related question here that focusses on the installation of piwik.
Logparser is a free tool from Microsoft that lets you throw direct SQL queries to the IIS Logs generated on your Web server. You may use it to query basic stats such as:
[1] From what ip-address range I get the maximum queries? (users' country-profile)
[2] What particular pages (aspx/html) are most frequently visited?
[3] At what time of the day, do I get the maximum requests?
I remember using this tool in one of my earlier projects, but the reason was to track down some performance issues. Also, the tool itself is console based, so you need to be familiar with command-line. However, a GUI front-end could be easily developed in a high-level language such as C#, I think there should be already some, that are free to download
Super new to programming.
Anyway, let's say I have a script that does something simple, like tells you the number of words you typed into a box (upon hitting a submit button) written in Ruby using Sinatra.
If I wanted this text box to show up on a webpage, like mysite.com/simple_app how would I set that up?
I apologize for the super noob question, but I have no idea where to start with this.
I checked out this question (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9489803/how-to-turn-ruby-script-into-a-web-app) and since I already have working w localhost in Sinatra, I'm kind of wondering what's the next step.
I would very much recommend you try out Heroku.
As you're relatively new to programming, you don't want to mess with server stuff yet. Heroku handles most of the server configurations so you can focus more on your application.
It also offers a free account, with limitations of course. But it's very nice for beginners, compared to VPS solutions which normally cost 20 bucks a month.
Check out this great article on deploying apps with Sinatra and Heroku:
Sinatra + Heroku = Super Fast Deployment
And also how to deploy any Rack-based applications on Heroku:
Deploying Rack-based Apps on Heroku
If you want to just deploy it somewhere and don't want to mess about with servers, try pushing your Sinatra app to Heroku. They have some fairly comprehensive documentation to get you started.
If you have your own server, it's a bit more involved, although what you trade off for simplicity you gain in control. The simplest thing that would work would be to check out a working copy of your app on said server, then run it like you do on localhost.
Google ruby deployment. It's a bit of a minefield, although the options are much more attractive than they were 5 years ago. For the simplest thing(s) that work, do either of the above. For anything else, you're out there with the rest of us ;)
The term is getting 'hotter' with Microsoft Azure and Windows 7.
What are the benefits + how does the status quo of desktop computing now change? Does the machine no longer need an OS installation (or a highly stripped down version of a typical OS)... what is needed to interact with the 'Cloud' ?
Update: Received my first RTFM on SO today.
To elaborate.. I'm interested in knowing how different is the 'new way' w.r.t. the services provided by a typical desktop OS today (read Win XP/Vista, linux flavors galore, etc.)... NOT the benefits of cloud computing.
Two buzzwords.
Basically its Microsoft's form of competition against Google's recent web-apps boom. So if you want to know what it's all about just open up google docs and gmail, and there you go :)
Now on a personal note, I'm glad Microsoft and Apple(Mobile Me) are trying to fight back against Google. We need the competition, so us the users can choose and get better apps.
Also I'm really not a fan of any corporation, so I'm not all that excited about Google killing off everyone else any more than Microsoft doing the same to others.
When Microsoft says Azure is a Cloud OS, what they mean is that it provides the same kind of services to developers targeting the "Cloud" abstractions that are akin to what a Desktop OS provides developers targeting desktop.
Amitabh Srivistava gave a great interview on Channel 9 explaining it. Basically, if you want to write a notepad application for a desktop user, you don't have to be concerned with writing code that interprets key strokes from the keyboard, or that sets up communications with a printer. This is due to the desktop os. Similarly, Azure lets a developer focus on their cloud app better by abstracting things like load balancing, authentication and authorization, failover, and a lot of concerns that one would normally have to address when developing for the Cloud.
Old school network diagrams always showed the internet as a cloud. Microsofts approach is still a client-server model, although a real 'cloud' os in theory would be a SOA architecture of loosely fit components interconnecting and working together without really being aware of eachother. Example: creating services for email, document authoring, file storage, etc- which could all be interconnected by different services that don't erally need to be aware of the final product.
So different way of thinking of it: the 'system' exists in the network- not one single location.
Gains: Transparency, redundancy (not only of each service, but for replacing parts if vendors drop out) and availability (as long as you are also connected to the network).
Losses: Vendor lock-ins, vendor's dropping out, interoperability nightmare, as far as I know- there are no real standards for this model.
Microsoft did not coin 'cloud' computing term. Please refer to the wikipedia entry for a more specific definition and etymology.
whats with the RTFM questions on SO lately? unless I'm missing some deeper meaning, your questions are obvious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing
Cloud computing is Internet-based
("cloud") development and use of
computer technology ("computing"). The
cloud is a metaphor for the Internet
(based on how it is depicted in
computer network diagrams) and is an
abstraction for the complex
infrastructure it conceals.[1] It is a
style of computing in which IT-related
capabilities are provided “as a
service”,[2] allowing users to access
technology-enabled services from the
Internet ("in the cloud")[3] without
knowledge of, expertise with, or
control over the technology
infrastructure that supports them.[4]
According to a 2008 paper published by
IEEE Internet Computing "Cloud
Computing is a paradigm in which
information is permanently stored in
servers on the Internet and cached
temporarily on clients that include
desktops, entertainment centers, table
computers, notebooks, wall computers,
handhelds, sensors, monitors, etc."[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Services_Platform
Microsoft's Azure Services Platform is
a cloud platform (cloud computing
platform as a service) offering that
"provides a wide range of internet
services that can be consumed from
both on-premises environments or the
internet"[1]. It is signficant in that
it is Microsoft's first step into
cloud computing following the recent
launch of the Microsoft Online
Services offering.
...
The idea and push from Microsoft to
compete directly in the software as a
service model that Google's Google
Docs have offered is increasingly seen
by them and others as an important
next step in application development.
In this idea, a software doesn't have
to be installed and managed on the
user's computer. It also allows files
and folders to be accessed from the
web.
So far, it looks like the idea of having software & your data hosted at msft's data centre.
SOA seems to be related to what cloud is offering.
No need to have local software (office will run from internet, your docs will be saved there. so that, you can access it anywhere). I think, the target could be big companies - thereby giving them services (software + hardware (data storage + processing power)) on subscription basis.
An expert can shed light on how this can be useful?
Will people be willing to put everything in the cloud?
Cloud is Time Sharing. Us old timers remember those days. You either wrote your own apps and ran it on their (the Time Share/Cloud providers) systems or you use the software they supplied. Usually word processors and accounting apps.
Google Apps is cloud. And since you get HD space you can already serve up your own app running on their systems.
Time Share was all the rage in the 70's and 80. Cause maintaining a system of your own wasn't cheap. Back then the smallest system any company ran was a mid-range (like Honeywell, AS400, Dec, etc, etc). Fell out of favor as the PC became popular. I remember when Lotus 1-2-3 came out and everyone predicted it would destroy what was left of Time Sharing. And it (along with dBase and other aps) did.
It's funny how we re-invite everything.
PS: Forgot one thing about Time Sharing. Since the Net wasn't around, you had to schedule your time. SO your staff would go to the providers Data Center and work. It was like renting space and the systems. Time Share and Cloud operate differently, but the function is the same.
Well like many new terms, there can be more than one answer. Frequently it can be defined as a compute platform, where the developer doesn't have to worry about resource management, scalability or hardware failures, because the cloud infrastructure handles it. Here is a link to some information the company I work for has:
http://www.appistry.com/resource-library/index.html
There are some good white papers linked here that might be helpful to you.
-Brett
A cloud operating system primarily manages the operation of one or more virtual machines within a virtualized environment.
Microsoft Windows Azure and Google Chrome OS are among current examples of cloud operating systems.
Azure App Service is one of the common and most used services. While it is possible to immediately deploy apps, jobs etc., to the app service, a common factor that baffles decision makers is the wide spectrum of the tiers (options of plans) available in the marketspace. To know more details,visit:https://www.impigertech.com/blog/azure-app-service/