DEV Community: Kshitij Gajanan Gavhane

Load Balancers Demystified: Your Gateway to Scalability📈

Kshitij Gajanan Gavhane — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 07:18:42 +0000

Are you a budding coder🧑‍💻 ? A college student navigating the intricate world of computer science? Or perhaps a junior developer eager to make your mark in the tech sphere? Well, hold onto your keyboards because today, we're diving into the thrilling realm of Load Balancers! 🚀

Why Load Balancers?

Imagine this: You've built a fantastic website or application that's taken the internet by storm. Users are flocking in from all corners of the web, and your servers are getting hammered with requests. But wait... are your servers prepared for this kind of traffic? That's where load balancers come to the rescue!

What's a Load Balancer Anyway?

In the simplest terms, a load balancer is like the conductor of an orchestra. It ensures that every instrument (server) plays its part in harmony, distributing the load evenly. Why? So your users experience lightning-fast response times, even during traffic spikes. 🎶

Balancing Act:

Let's say you run an e-commerce site in India, and during the festive season, the traffic goes through the roof. Without a load balancer, your server could collapse under the pressure like a deflated balloon at a birthday party. But with a load balancer in place, it redirects users to available servers, keeping your website up and running smoothly.

Types of Load Balancers:

Round Robin: This type of load balancer serves requests in a cyclical order. It's like taking turns – everyone gets a go.
Least Connections: Imagine you're in a cafeteria, and you join the queue with the fewest people. That's precisely what a least connections load balancer does – it sends requests to the server with the fewest active connections.
IP Hash: Think of this one as a detective looking at fingerprints. It directs requests based on the client's IP address, ensuring the same client always connects to the same server.

The Magic Behind the Scenes:

Load balancers aren't just clever; they're downright brilliant. They monitor the health of servers, like doctors keeping tabs on patients. If a server starts feeling sick (high response times or errors), the load balancer takes it out of the rotation until it recovers.

Load Balancers in Real Life

Let's put it in perspective. Remember booking your train ticket online? It's like standing in line at the ticket counter. The ticket seller (server) may be busy, so you switch to the shorter line. You're effortlessly redirected to the next available seller. That's the load balancer at work, making your ticket booking experience a breeze!

In the World of the Cloud:

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud offer load balancing services. For instance, AWS Elastic Load Balancing ensures that traffic to your application is evenly distributed across multiple servers, no matter where your users are in India or beyond.

Conclusion: Embrace the Balancing Act!

As a junior developer or computer science enthusiast, understanding load balancers is your ticket to building robust and scalable applications. Just like a conductor brings out the best in an orchestra, load balancers ensure your servers deliver the best performance possible.

So, whether you're coding in your college dorm or setting up your first project, remember this: load balancers are your trusty sidekick in the world of web scalability. Master their art, and you'll be well on your way to crafting remarkable, high-performing digital experiences!

Keep coding, keep learning, and keep the tech world rocking, one balanced server at a time! 💻🌐🚀

Now, go forth, young developer, and conquer the world of load balancing! 🌟

NFT: The Beginning

Kshitij Gajanan Gavhane — Tue, 08 Feb 2022 16:39:17 +0000

Hi there!!👋
Everyone is uttering about NFT, not because it sounds cool to say but because there is a lot of money involved🤑🤑🤑
Are you wondering what NFTs are, why they're so popular right now... and why they're so valuable.
If you ever collected anything Coins, Stickers, art or anything like that; think of it as a digital version of that, but so much more stick around and we'll explain why this is important for you as a collector, a creator, an investor and even an artist. An NFT is a digital asset a Non-Fungible Token. But to explain that let's break it down and compare it to something in the physical world, So a fungible asset- for example currency like a 2000 Rupees note💸 is always worth, whatever is printed on that note. No matter who owns it or what condition it's in, so a non-fungible token is a unique asset that lives on the Blockchain that represents a piece of digital art.
Or some other asset that can't be exchanged or interchanged in the real world, Alright crypto is just art that's digital but they're digital files and they're tokenized which means they have a tiny bit of code that's attached to them. That signifies that they're rare and that the artist that made them is is guaranteeing that that they've made them and that there's only one of its kind.
So many copies available in the world and it's basically the same as physical digital people are doing. Some people are starting to tokenize bits of code and programs. So,
How are they created?
Well anyone can create an NFT and the process goes like this
1)Create a unique digital asset this can be anything. It could be a piece of art, could be a photo, it could be a video anything that can exist digitally and uniquely.
2)So once you have your digital asset you'll need to mint it, which basically puts it on the blockchain that assigns a unique id to it.
3)You will then put that in your cryptocurrency wallet so you can actually track it and log it once on the Blockchain. The scarcity and uniqueness of your digital asset is secured.

A lot of people see it as an investment opportunity. And also it's just a great way for artists to generate new ideas that aren't linked to corporate advertising campaigns. Once your asset is minted you can choose to put it on a marketplace like opensea.io , WazirX and other available platforms which allow you to list your NFTs for sale. Once listed on these marketplaces they're now available for anyone to purchase. The really cool thing about having these on a blockchain is that their transaction records are available for anyone to view. This is especially advantageous to creators, as part of the minting process you as the creator can ensure that you get a royalty payment in infinity, So what does that mean?
Lets say you set a 10 royalty to this, now Every time it's sold you're going to get 10 of that sale value forever and because it's all part of the blockchain your ledger's automatically going to be crediting your crypto wallet, with that royalty payment it's automatic and it's forever and the other thing is, this all opens up other avenues that don't exist in the physical art world.
Question arises Why are these so valuable🤔?
Well! collectors like to collect things and they especially like to collect items that very few or even nobody else has and that's what NFTs allow you to do, compared to a physical collectible.
An NFT authenticity is absolute on the blockchain it can't be forged it can't be faked and the ownership records are there for all to see, but as with anything the value of the collectable is up to the demand in the marketplace.
Like when you buy a print from somebody like Andy Warhol
,
the print is valuable because it came from andy warhol's factory and there are other companies that can print a copy of that but it won't hold the same value and this is the same thing but with digital files while you may be able to make copies of the nyan cat animation there still can only be one original just like you could take a photo of the Mona lisa
.

There's still only one gallery that actually owns the original that validated original ownership is what's truly valuable. Here everything else is a copy or a fake and because of the blockchain ledger it can be proven NFTs have really put the power back into the hands of the original artists. Traditionally an artist would be Commissioned to create a piece of work, they would get paid for that work and then whoever commissioned it would then be able to resell that at any time as often as they want and the original artist never sees any of that now with nfts and the blockchain the original artist can see all the transactions that happen to that piece of art also get compensated automatically for that work via royalties…

so is this a good investment ⁉️
Again that really depends, you can support your favorite artists by buying an NFT from them having that original piece of art and that'll be the end of the story. you'll feel good the artist would feel good because they got paid but if you're doing this as an investment that's where it gets a little Bit more murky let's talk about that for a second. So After a number of high-profile NFT sales the market has become flooded by lesser known names but if you're a collector driven by rarity and uniqueness NFTs satisfy a lot of the criteria for value that you might have and there's no question that you own the real deal in this case there's no question NFTs is a fascinating subject.

So that’s it we've just scratched the surface here if there's anything you'd like to correct me please do comment :)

Native apps vs Cross-platform Apps

Kshitij Gajanan Gavhane — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 07:01:53 +0000

Today is all about apps…..about iPhones and androids so,
How to build apps for these cool devices?
Of course, if you want to be an ios developer you're going to need a mac or if you want to build android apps you can use a mac or pc or Linux. You have some opportunities there but let's dive in and talk all about apps and app development.
Do you know what question App developers get every single day? “Should I do cross-platform app development or native app development?”
Which ones to choose? Swift vs Kotlin vs Java vs React native vs Flutter and Dart vs Ionic vs Xamarin, so many technologies and so many questions. There are different answers depending on what you want to do with your life and your products can also depend on which technology you use so there's going to be some very great information in here. We'll talk about jobs, freelancing, the quality of the platform and so much more.
So here we go, first off let's talk about native apps
What is a native app?
A native app means that you're building with Swift for ios or Kotlin for android. It could also mean Java for android. IOS apps support objective c and they support swift also. Those would both be considered native apps. Though nobody is using objective c anymore🙃. Now with android, Kotlin is the new hot programming language that's replacing java for the android platform. Let's talk about ios… When would you want to build an app natively with swift?

Well there are a few reasons first off, if you want to get a full-time job as an ios developer- you're going to want to learn swift, that is your fastest path to a full-time job. Most companies that want to build an app for their business are going to go with native because it will deliver a great performance, it's going to be super fast and there are the most amount of developers available for them to hire. Native app development is the fastest app development you can do, there are no intermediary layers and this goes the same for android but native app development is going to give you the most performance of any app that you could ever create. Now to native android. The options here are Kotlin or Java. We used to build android apps all in Java but now we do it in Kotlin. Although android still supports java but it's now a second-class citizen. Google, who's the main backer behind android, also favours Kotlin. They want everyone on Kotlin as future of android is going there, so if you ever have the question ‘should I learn java or Kotlin for android?’ I suggest Kotlin. That's where all the jobs are going to be now. However when you've learn the core foundation of android and Kotlin, make sure to learn some java because you're going to encounter it on a full-time job and again when would you want to use native android well ,especially if you want to get a full-time job or if you're building a product or startup that you need extreme performance native android , that’s way to go. Again, medium or large companies often start with native apps.
Now let's talk about cross-platform apps for a little bit.
What is a cross-platform app?
The idea is that you write code once and you can deploy it to multiple platforms. Facebook made this popular with something called react-native. What is React you may ask? Well React is a web component framework that helps you build cool web apps with this super elegant component modularized framework and now they have brought it to mobile which means that with react native you can write code in javascript and react but you can pull out the native features of the device of the phone like the camera ,the GPS, all those things. It basically talks to it natively so you could build an app and deploy multiple places. Now let me tell you something, a lot of people make the mistake of just writing it once and deploying it everywhere when they are building a native app but that doesn’t work well with the react-native. When Facebook actually invented react native ,and it's still there in their docs, they say “react native was not designed to make one code base and deployed everywhere”, the reason why they designed react-native was so that they could use web technologies to iterate faster, their apps had become so big; the facebook ad had become so huge that it takes hours to compile single small change, so they wanted something where they can write the code in javascript and get real-time updates because javascript is an interpreted language, it changes instantly. So they could just write the code once and deploy it everywhere.
Now,
Why don't a lot of companies immediately just embrace cross-platform when you think it saves money?
Well, javascript's a slower language, it's a very very slow language. In a recent test where 10 million lines of code in c++ and 10 million lines of code in javascript were compiled javascript took 59 seconds to run while in c++ it only took one second, that's the difference we're talking about with a compiled language versus an interpreted language like javascript.
Now let's suppose you have apps that don't need intense hardware rendering and things like that, react native is a great choice. You may think Instagram is built on react native and they've got video stuff, well keep in mind it has a team full of developers whose whole life is solely dedicated to performance and making things great. As a single app developer though you are not going to squeeze out crazy performance in javascript for your native apps.
You can also learn flutter and dart which is the new big competitor to react native (flutter is the framework & darts the programming language).Flutter is backed by Google, it's way newer than react-native but it is so powerful which gives you an amazing developer experience you can already tell.
The approach used by flutter is just different, their approach isn't about apps and deployment is everywhere. So what is it about if not that?
“We want you to build an amazing experience for your users whatever your users need and we don't want you to worry about the various platforms we want to handle so that you focus on your experience”. Flutter and Dart are all about creating the experience of writing the code once and then deploying as needed to the various platforms without having to put any thought into it. Flutter also is a super user-friendly environment, it uses the dart programming language which is fast but it also uses web assembly which is also faster than javascript so right off the bat it's going to perform better than javascript. Again it's still new in recent years and it's only going to get better as we move along.
NOW! let's talk about just the money and freelancing behind cross-platform apps. You are not going to find any jobs for a flutter or react-native but the real jobs are in native. They're innate now if you want to become a top freelancer where you go to clients and you say ” I can build you an iPhone and android app for your business to help you make more money”, you have huge opportunities with cross-platform.
You can go far with a cross-platform system but there are no jobs there, the jobs are in native. So there's some overview of native and cross-platform and I just want to mention a few more, one is Xamarin. Xamarin allows you to build cross-platform apps in c sharp. Professional opinion states you should only ever use
Xamarin if your team is well versed in it. If your team is c-sharp experts and you don't want to learn new stuff that's when you should use Xamarin, it does not have as many features as react native or flutter and there are lots of problems with that might come with it. Also in my experience the apps just don't come out as high quality. Again you can try it out for yourself but Xamarin allows you to build cross-platform apps with c-sharp and even though the platform isn’t the most reliable option we can still built an app in the company for it.
Similarly with ionic, ionic is like a third-party type of framework for building cross-platform apps. It's been around for a while, some people like but…. better to go for the open-source route of react native or flutter and dart where huge companies are backing it. There are some other older ones too like phone gap and things like that but, really the true contenders for the cross-platform are flutter versus react native.
Flutter is faster by design because it's going to be used with a web assembly under the hood….
Javascript is typically a slow language, as mentioned earlier but if you are a javascript developer and that's what you know, obviously do react native, it makes sense
So at last moving forward to some tips related to cross-platform…the jobs are in native, you can do great things with freelancing and cross-platform if you're a small business or app and you want to focus on your business without having to hire a bunch of developers. If you need extreme performance use native swift or native Kotlin and android.
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