DEV Community: Serhiy Kozlov

The SaaS Application Development Lifecycle

Serhiy Kozlov — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 15:21:30 +0000

The depiction of an enterprise which has not taken advantage of SaaS is humorously portrayed by Basecamp, a SaaS project management provider:

What Basecamp is saying is that enterprises who make the decision to purchase the services of a SaaS provider will have a far more organized and efficient operation – one that is managed, is SaaS-based in the cloud and which allows all members of a team to function successfully.

Indeed, this seems to be the biggest draw of SaaS, along with the fact that all of the data and access to that data is stored and managed off-site, relieving an enterprise from software and hardware purchases and upgrades/scaling. Further, it allows designated employees to access that data from any location. And, in fact, SaaS providers deliver greater security than most enterprises can provide in-house.

In short, SaaS provides a real solution to businesses struggling with traditional and inefficient in-house systems.

Because of these benefits, SaaS is a rapidly expanding niche, and many entrepreneurs and innovators are moving into the realm of SaaS application development to solve enterprise issues and to become a reputable vendor in the marketplace.

The SaaS development process, whether for external sales or internal use, involves a life cycle, each piece of which is critical to an end product that is solid, useful, and appealing to customers or in-house staff.

The SaaS Development Life Cycle Begins With The Vision

The vision begins with identifying a need on the part of the organization or, more often, other enterprises, for a SaaS product. The product must solve a problem for it to be viable. Ideas will be thrown out and evaluated. Market research will be conducted. In the end, there will be a vision of the scope of the SaaS product that will be developed.

Developing the Plan

How will the product be developed, launched, and marketed? Software development strategies for building a SaaS are obviously the first concern, for this will involve the initial outlay of resources. Decisions regarding SaaS developers who may need to bring on board, the technical specifications which those developers will then use through that coming state of development, and, of course, the projected budget. At the end of each iteration of the project, planning should be reviewed and modified as necessary.

The Subscription Stage

This stage in the SaaS software development life cycle comes as all decisions relative to cost and architecture have been finalized. It is the time when there is plenty of communication with the selected cloud provider. Part of this communication and cooperation will be testing that provider’s capabilities and an evaluation of their performance. This process should culminate in a subscription with that cloud provider, with custom details of the services to be provided. While there are many factors to be considered in the choice of a SaaS platform, probably the most important is the cloud provider selection.

During this phase, the other tasks will include the formulation of backup and disaster recovery plans, so that you can ensure top performance and service availability to your clients.

Each iteration, as completed, should be tested and the cloud provider’s performance audited. The subscription details may have to be modified, and, in fact, this is common.

The Development Stage

This stage is complex and is where the proverbial “rubber meets the road.” Many decisions must be made in terms of architecture. There are, however, some basic elements that must be present for SaaS to be considered valuable to potential clients and to be a profitable product for the SaaS development company. They are as follows:

Multiple Tenants: there is no point in developing SaaS for sale unless it is developed for many tenants with the potential to scale later on.
User Discoverability: the software must be user-friendly and easy to pick up.
Security: customers must be shown and must believe that there is exceptional protection of their data – better protection than perhaps they can provide on their own. Encryption and a highly secure access process are critical.
Customer Support: processes built-in for this, as well as the rapid rollout of updates.

With these basic tenets in mind, the development and architecture will mean the following:

1. Selection of a Software Development Methodology

There are many choices in what is known as the “software development lifecycle.” The most common are as follows:

Rapid Development: a prototype is quickly developed for speed of development and then tested.
Iterative – small scale development with subsequent iterations for scaling.
Spiral – development divided into cycles, each of which is evaluated and then the next cycle may be developed with a different methodology.
Waterfall – The entire project is developed through a sequence of phases.
Agile – a type of iterative development with feedback on each iteration, so that refinement can occur before the next iteration begins.

Currently, Agile is the most commonly used; however, many SaaS project developers do switch back and forth among some of these and many other methodologies as they work through phases of a project. Sometimes, the architectural details demand it.

2. SaaS Will Mean HTML5 (at least for desktops)

New products will use HTML5 technology – it is most suitable in today’s environment. This is because it can provide RIA (rich internet applications) with no need for legacy plugins.

When Microsoft announced that it was discontinuing support of Windows XP in 2014, there began a slow death of Microsoft platforms that would not support HTML5. Current browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome) all have a model that updates their browser automatically.

There may be some lingering issues with the use of HTML5 for mobile devices but they are rapidly disappearing. Still, testing any software on mobile should be a consideration. If developers see issues, then a native app may be the best solution.

3. SaaS Requires Published API’s

SaaS products must have API’s that provide for the development of other capabilities by value-added resellers and other third-party developers, and that will integrate with other software, such as that of Big Data and analytics. If clients cannot access their data except through the SaaS package they have purchased, then that vendor has to provide the API.

API’s have to be consistent and should be maintained after publishing, especially for any additional version of the software. In short, developers must ensure that APIs can be extended. This will require a very thoughtful architecture.

4. Multi-Tenancy Issues

SaaS development is, by definition, server-side development. When multiple clients share a common server, the demands on developers is far greater than developing for a sole tenant. Obviously, solid security is a must, so that data is isolated from other tenants. Given this, developers should provide for tenants who want dedicated storage that is in no way co-mingled with that of other tenants. Thus, developers must decide among three models for multi-tenant storage – a database schema for each tenant, a database for each tenant, or a fully shared database, with each tenant accessing its individual data via an ID. Decisions must be based upon the original vision – what types of clients will you market to?

5. SaaS and Stateless Architecture

Stateless architecture is preferred because it provides top performance, elasticity, scalability, and tolerance for fault. If applications are stateless, there is no need to allocate storage of previous requests, and the cost is lower. They can also scale easily when there are spikes in usage and contract as use declines. Stateful architecture requires more management and does take up more infrastructure resources.

Certainly, stateless SaaS architecture is not required, but it will provide the best performance.

6. SaaS Upgrades – Frequent and Non-Disruptive

The process of upgrades must be built into the architecture with a methodology that will not disrupt user clients. Generally, SaaS companies do not have a lot of versions out there – usually two. If a new version is developed with upgrades, it can be done on a separate server before any clients are migrated over – this minimizes disruptions.

SaaS companies have to be wary of disrupting the client, have to consider UI changes that might require training, and the software architecture has to provide for strong resilience from a failure with short recovery time.

7. Redundancy and High Availability Level

Failures of the software, a machine instance, data availability, the network, or data integrity do occur. The architecture must anticipate this and include the technology to recover from failures with the least disruption to clients. Redundancy can be provided by the database platform or the Infrastructure as a Service. Some IaaS providers will provide up to three copies of the data, ensuring data availability. Corruption of data is the toughest, and it will require that the software is architected to recover data from a consistent prior state.

8. Operations – Requirements for Development

Integration of such things as new tenant on-boarding and billing must be built into the software architecture. The same goes for monitoring, detection of faults and intrusions (and remediation), and security. Prior to subscribing to a SaaS provider, all of these development ops were the responsibility of the enterprise’s IT team. No longer.

The software must also provide for load balancing and providing on-demand additional resources. Help is certainly available from IaaS and PaaS providers (if they are used) and third-party tools, but integration must be in the software product itself. There is no single model for all of this, and developers will have to be creative and innovative.

SaaS Implementation Methodology and Deployment

Once the software is deployed, there will be frequent updates and the need for such things as security patches, so that support requests can be kept to a minimum and the UX is continually improved.

Helpdesk calls and/or support tickets all result in increased operational costs, so the goal should always be to automate as much as possible and, of course, minimize the calls for service assistance. Constant monitoring and patches/updates will keep customers happy.

SaaS Development, Operations, and Management are Unique

Anyone or any enterprise considering SaaS development must invest heavily in the talent to get it done. This is the most expensive part of the endeavor, requiring very specific skill sets. And, if you intend to have a top-rated piece of software – robust, expansion-ready, innovative, well-received UX and UI, secure, and reliable in its implementation – then you must be prepared for the costs involved.

You Have Another Option

If you have an innovative SaaS idea, bring it to our development team at Romexsoft. We have a group of first-rate pros with years of experience in SaaS development. They will collaborate with you through the entire SaaS lifecycle and produce exactly what you envision. In the end, you will have world-class software to take to the marketplace.
Originally published at Romexsoft’s blog:
The SaaS Application Development Lifecycle

When and Why Java is Suitable for Application

Serhiy Kozlov — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 16:47:17 +0000

Why Java?
Did you know that around 4 million people are active on Slack per day?

Undoubtedly, it’s a robust cloud app - fast, secure, scalable and with no glitches.

What you may not know is that Slack was developed using Java, a programming language that is as versatile as it is reliable.

Using Java For Web Applications

Chatting is fun, but, at least where Java is concerned, the uses of this programming language go far beyond messengers.

Today, in fact, it is the most used runtime platform on enterprise systems (more than 97% of desktops). But more than that, its virtual machine powers packages and custom business applications, and a wide array of mobile and other embedded platforms.

Currently, according to Oracle, more than 3 billion devices run Java in some form. Most major companies use Java for some of their functions and Java server applications are processing tens of millions of requests each day.

For both large enterprises and small companies that need business software applications, Java development is the way to go, and here are the reasons why.

General Advantages of Using Java for Business Applications

Programming with Java is incredibly common for banking and fintech web applications. Compared to other programming languages, Java definitely stands out in terms of security functionality and environment.

First of all, it comes with certain built-in security features such as:

Cryptography which includes comprehensive APIs including digital signatures, message authentication codes, ciphers and more.

Advanced Authentication and Access Control that allows incorporating a range of secure login mechanisms, along with creating the custom security policy and enforce a well-defined permission access policy to sensitive data. In simple words, “breaking into” your web application becomes not so easy and your internal data stays safe and sound.

The platform also supports Public Key Infrastructure aimed at improving the application response time when it comes to checking/validating security certificate statuses; it comes with a set of handy APIs and secure communication protocols, which additionally protect all the external and internal data shared with your app.

Finally, Java’s security platform itself is built upon the “sandbox” principle. Your app runs in a secure shell that no intruder (think malware) can hack into from the outside. This is the beauty of Java programming when it comes to building secure environments for your product.

Here’s another instance when to use Java.

Due to its computing nature, Java is particularly well-suited to deal with complex business logic implementations. Let’s take a Fintech wealth management app, for example, that suggests the best investment options and portfolio management.

The customer-facing app should be able to churn multiple deals and comparisons after analyzing the input data. Everything happens within seconds. What you might not think about, is the way this data is processed and how different relationships and data sources are leveraged to present the outcomes to the customer:

Client’s past transactions;
Records related to their current portfolio;
Overall stock market trends;
Investments made by users with similar portfolios.

By opting for Java software development services, in this case, you’d be able to create more complex analytical systems and architecture, without “overweighting” your product. All the technical magic will securely happen at the backend of your product.

Specific Advantages of Programming With Java

The application of Java for virtually any business need has become obvious in recent years. Some of this, of course, is because new versions are continually enhancing the possibilities. Version 8, which is in standard use now, will soon be replaced by version 9, adding even more robustness.

The details of programming enhancements are not really what the business owner is interested in. He is interested in results - the details of why use Java and what it could do to fulfill their business needs. Here is a brief rundown of those details.

“Write Once, Use Anywhere”

This has been a mantra of Java for years, and it is probably the singular most important feature of this language – also called “portability.”

What it means is this: the business owner contracts with a Java programmer to develop a program. Once developed, that app can be used on any device and on any operating system. This is what is meant when developers talk about a Java virtual machine. It is its own self-contained “machine” that can be superimposed onto any operating system and into any hardware that exists.

Business owners no longer have to worry about changing hardware or operating systems and then facing the hassle and cost of rectifying the incompatibility of existing software.

This is a huge benefit of Java over .Net, as .Net requires only a Windows-based platform.

Multithreading

Java apps are able to manage their own use by multiple users at the same time, creating threads for each use within the program itself, rather than having to run multiple copies of the programming in the same hardware. Each thread is tracked until the “work” is finished.

For you as a product owner that stands for:

Better product performance due to the more optimal usage of cache storage and CPU resources. Even when a hundred thousands of users are still engaging with your product, it remains stable and non-glitching.
Faster response time - user commands are rendered within seconds even when the app is used by a large number of people simultaneously.
More operations can be executed simultaneously meaning that your app doesn’t “think” too long before making the next step.
Decreased maintenance costs - again, due to more economic resources usage.
Fewer glitches - multithreaded servers will always remain responsive and function no matter how long a certain process runs whereas single-threaded servers could become unresponsive and “bottleneck” your operations.

Memory Management is Another Big Advantage

This can get a bit technical, but there is a simple way to understand the ease with which Java handles memory.

All Java objects “live” in what is called a “heap.” A heap is created when an app starts up and can increase or decrease as it runs. If the heap becomes full, then “garbage” is collected and removed. Basically, objects that are no longer in use are taken out. New objects then have space to come in. There are other aspects of this, such as the “nursery” where newer objects are stored and the “old space” where older objects from the nursery go before eventually being taken out.

The point is that there is an automatic system in place to manage memory. This, in turn, helps to manage the efficacy and speed of the app.

Scalability

Java is easily scalable because the components are widely available. Whether you plan to scale your app vertically or horizontally, the language will accommodate your needs, especially at the business logic and permanent storage tiers.

In simple language that means that whenever you decide to improve your app’s response time and performance, less invasive coding would be required and fewer hours would be billed by Java developers.

These four benefits should easily answer the question of why Java is needed for business apps.

Development is faster, far less costly, and the result is a robust application that is reliable, bug-free, and portable to any device or operating system. No other programming language offers these features all wrapped in a package.

Finding Next-Gen Java Development

Outsourcing Java development just makes sense, because it is budget-friendly and the language is universally popular.

Yet, the challenge is to find a reputable company that can provide custom application development based upon a non-techie’s explanation of the basics they want those apps to be able to do. And, this must be within the parameters of the client’s budget constraints. Fortunately, offshore Java development services offer promising solutions.

There are countries that are gaining wide global recognition for software development expertise.

Java development in Ukraine, for example, has certainly earned its place within the international community. PwC currently ranks Ukraine 5th out of Top 25 IT outsourcing regions.

Institutions of higher education, with significant government support, are producing highly skilled software engineers. To be exact, around 38.000 graduates per year. Yet, hiring for senior positions isn’t an issue either as around 19% of Ukrainian programmers have 7+ years of experience. Outsourcing Java development to Ukraine should certainly be considered.

The Future of Java Development

Right now, Java has been termed the “darling” of application development, for obvious reasons. It is so versatile and provides robust customized solutions for almost any type of business need. This “referred position” shows no signs of declining, especially now that Java 9 is on the horizon. It just keeps getting better.

If you are looking for business apps that can provide the functions you need and dedicated team of developers who will take your needs and ideas and translate them into Java applications that work, then get in touch with the folks at Romexsoft! We have solutions for you.

Written by Romexsoft on May 2, 2019

Amazon Polly – Text-to-Speech

Serhiy Kozlov — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 16:36:21 +0000

Amazon Polly is one of the newer add-ons to the AWS cloud services portfolio. Originally, launched in 2016, this Text-to-Speech (TTS) tool recently received a host of new features.

As the name suggests, Amazon Polly can effectively convert any written texts to human speech, allowing users to build voice-enabled products, apps, and services. Amazon uses the latest deep learning tech to empower Polly with superior functionality for synthesizing human speech so that it closely resembles the voice of a real human.

What’s Cool about Amazon Polly?

Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) functionality

Amazon Polly supports a dozen different languages and can re-create a wide array of natural-sounding voice timbres. Amazon Polly is well-articulated and can help you deliver top-notch voice output to your audiences.

Flexible set-up and customization

You can switch between different voices depending on your needs. The service supports various SSML tags and lexicons. Thus, you can effectively control different speech aspects such as volume, articulation, speed, etc.

Robust API

Amazon’s APIs are well documented and let you set up integrations in no time.

Comprehensive programming language support

Amazon Polly supports all popular coding languages included in SDK and AWS Mobile SDK (iOS / Android). Polly also supports API HTTP.

Affordable Cost

The service has a pay-per-use pricing model (offers a free tier). You can get a better sense of costs here.

Niche Use Cases

Audio content creation
e-Learning
Telephony

Two New Amazon Polly Features Worth of Your Attention

Polly’s latest add-ons are Newscaster and Neural Text-To-Speech (NTTS).

Neural Text-to-Speech (NTTS) enables Amazon Polly to rapidly learn the difference in speech styles and imitate those. As of August 2019, Polly can speak in 11 different voices: 3 British accents and 8 American English accents. In total, Amazon Polly supports 29 languages and lets you use different voices in several of them.
Amazon Polly Newscaster closely mimics natural language patterns, so that media publishers can broadcast the new information and original reporting faster.

This service is a popular tool among ‘big name’ news companies, as well as some popular language learning applications.

For example:

"The Globe and Mail" – a popular Canadian news publisher – was among Newscaster early adopters.
“Gannett Co”., – a US media powerhouse that owns USA Today, along with several other regional papers, also uses Polly.
Duolingo – a popular language learning app – uses Amazon Polly for rendering texts in different languages.

The Romexsoft team has also used Amazon Polly in one of our recent projects for Trinity Audio. We asked Alex, our Java Team Lead to explain how we incorporate Amazon Polly.

How Amazon Polly Powers Trinity Player

"One of the products we have been working on is an audio player that a user can integrate into a web page, and translate all the text into audio (text-to-speech). The player uses Amazon Polly and it's neural net, in particular, to ‘read' the texts out loud in a pleasant voice. Or you can adjust the setting, and make the tone more dramatics with ‘breaking news' reading style.

Some of the cool Trinity Player features include the ability to translate texts into different languages, display advertising (a major part of our project), plus some additional perks. For instance, to effectively incorporate advertising we use speech marks. These let us estimate when the new sentence begins so that we can incorporate an audio ad without breaking up a sentence.

Since we are also using Amazon for a multitude of tasks (Translation, Polly, EC2, S3, and a bunch of other services), I always have to pay careful attention to my code quality. Or else a sloppy bug can eat up your entire testing budget in one blink :).

Trinity Player is a cool product, but it’s more tricky than you might think. I mean, yeah, it looks like an audio player with a 70px UI, how complicated it can be?

But you constantly need to solve a lot of challenging tasks from a technical standpoint. The product does not have SPA, React, Angular or any other fancy framework. This forces you to think out of the box and work with everything at hand: OM, CSS selectors, postMessage, audio, NodeJS, DB (Redis, MySQL, memSQL, Presto ), CICD, testing, Docker, etc.

We also spend a great deal of time testing the app (unit, e2e).

You are feeling a great deal of responsibility for the product, your code, and the importance of testing because you are developing a product people want to use!"

Alex (Romexsoft Javascript Team Lead)

How Romexsoft Can Help You?

As an AWS partner, we provide both professional services (cloud migration, cloud solutions, consulting, and cloud-native application development) and managed AWS services, to reduce costs, improve security and boost operational efficiency

Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consulting session!

Originally published at Romexsoft Blog: https://www.romexsoft.com/blog/amazon-polly-text-to-speech/

Top 10 AWS Cloud Migration Tools and Services

Serhiy Kozlov — Mon, 04 Nov 2019 15:31:32 +0000

Cloud migration is already past the cautious exploratory phase. We bring to your attention: List of Top 10 AWS cloud migration tools. In 5 years, as much as 98% of businesses will be relying on some cloud software and technologies. That makes perfect sense when you consider the benefits of infrastructure, data and cloud application migration:

Reduced total cost of ownership
Instant, on-demand resources scaling
Automated disaster recovery and improved business continuity
A solid competitive edge.

The question that remains, however, is how do you get to the cloud and what type of migration software to use to ensure a smooth and effective transition.

Small and mid-sized companies are looking for ease, for the ability to migrate with as little hassle as possible, along with the power to scale, to integrate the services it has selected, and to pay a competitive rate. Among the premier cloud platforms meeting all of these criteria is AWS.

Why Migrate to AWS?

Amazon Web Services was launched in 2006. While cloud computing was not a brand new concept at that time, Amazon’s entry into this sector commoditized this technology and made it more accessible to businesses of all sizes. By 2018, AWS had captured 40% of this market share, although Microsoft Azure and Google have moved into this market as well, claiming 17% and 8% respectively.

So, why has AWS kept its leadership role in cloud migration and cloud migration services? The short answer is that it has stayed “on top” of the industry, continually evolving, adding new tools, making migration easy and seamless, and partnering with other SaaS cloud migration tools and services to enhance the user experience.

While there certainly are large enterprises using AWS, the interesting fact is that small and mid-sized companies actually make up the majority of users – about 90%, in fact. Knowing this, AWS has done many things to take care of the bulk of its users. In particular, they created a lot of helpful tools and resources for creating and executing an AWS migration strategy with ease.

But, before we dive in, let’s first settle on the terms.

What is Migration Software?

In IT, migration is the process of transitioning from one operating environment to another one. In the case with the cloud, this process involved upgrading to new software and executing cloud data migration, moving applications to new environments and setting up new supporting infrastructure.

Clearly, that’s a complex process and oftentimes it requires a middleware solution – software tools that can assist with transferring data, configuring applications and bringing any infrastructure gaps between your technology and the cloud vendor's. In short, that’s what migration software is for.

Granted, most cloud platforms provide you with all the tools and software you need to bring your cloud strategy to life. We bring to your attention: List of Top 10 AWS Cloud Migration Tools to choose for business in 2019.

List of the top 10 must-have AWS cloud migration tools and services:

AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)
TSO Logic
Cloud Endure
BMC Discovery
Turbonomic
New Relic Software Analytics
Dynatrace
Attunity CloudBeam
AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)
AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform

Why the Right Migration Tools Matter

AWS is the frontrunner among cloud service providers. It has no intention of remaining stagnant and continues to enhance its services while making it easier for businesses to conduct their assessment, develop their own migration plans, implement those plans through available tools, and then manage their use in the most cost-effective way.

However, even with the right tools in your kit, cloud migration can end up being a complex and costly process if you lack the proper in-house IT expertise. At Romexsoft, we are long sold on AWS, its commitment to businesses of all sizes, and its continual development and new and better tools to support its users. And our DevOps team of AWS-certified engineers is ready to step in and assist you with cloud migration!

How Romexsoft Can Help You?

Get in touch with us today to schedule a free consulting session!
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog Top 10 AWS Cloud Migration Tools and Services

11 Best Practices and Tools to Improve the Java Code Quality

Serhiy Kozlov — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 08:52:08 +0000

Usually, if you work on a software project and especially at the beginning of it, the code quality is not the first thing you pay attention to. However, the question of how to improve code quality and efficiency should be one of the main concerns for the java developers, technical team lead, system architect, and even project manager. How to improve the Java code quality?

The code quality improvement is one of the things that require a well-developed strategy and adhering to it throughout the project’s life cycle. It is only a matter of time when it will catch you up and cause the problems if you will just leave it unaddressed. That is why it is much better to manage this problem beforehand.

At Romexsoft, we commonly use Java for our projects and always look at the ways how to improve code quality in Java. We do this by following software quality improvement techniques and using Java Code Quality tools that help us not only to improve our code but also our productivity.

In this article, we will take a look at the most used development methodologies and top-notch tools that we use to create better code. The intent is to consider the common approaches to code quality and help teams choose methodology and tool, that makes their process efficiently.

What is a Software Development Methodology?

The software development methodology is a set of patterns and rules that are used to structure, plan, and control the process of software solutions developing. In order to manage the development process efficiently, the project manager must select the development methodologies that suit the appropriate project the most.

So, let’s run through some of them to understand, why different methodologies exist and which of them are the most commonly used.

Pair Programming

Pair programming is a proven methodology that decreases bugs in your code. It is done by two developers who share one workspace (a keyboard and a screen) and it looks like a flashback from school or university - one developer is coding while another reads the written code and contemplates potential issues. Developers coach each other in coding and can change roles during a session.

The main benefit of pair programming is knowledge sharing and code quality improvement. It also improves communication inside the team.

Pair programming is not only about the code but it can be used for OS command lines, work with DB server, file management, work with cloud and many other cases.

So if you work on the more complex or critical items feel free to team up with your co-workers and use this methodology to prevent bugs/issues in your code. Given the higher costs of bugs/issues that will be found later during development or after the release pair programming saves your time and money.

Considering the common knowledge that ‘two heads are better than one’, the discussion about pair programming seems to have died down and people actually do practice it.

Coding Conventions

Coding conventions are the set of guidelines that are developed by dev teams and include the recommendations for the programming style, practices, and methods for each aspect of a code that is written within the company or certain project. These conventions are usually specific for every programming language and cover file organization, indentation, comments, declarations, statements, white spaces, naming conventions, programming practices and principles, programming rules, architectural best practices, etc. The main advantage of defined standards is that every piece of code looks and feels familiar. It makes it more readable and helps programmers understand code written by another programmer.

If the coding standards are followed by and applied consistently throughout the development process, in the future, it will be easier to maintain and extend the code, refactor it, and resolve integration conflicts. The standard itself matters much less than adherence to it.

Code conventions are important to programmers for a number of reasons:

40% - 80% of the lifetime cost of software goes to maintenance.
Hardly any software is maintained for its whole life by its author.
Code conventions improve the readability of the software, allowing programmers to understand the new code more quickly.

Frankly speaking, I am a big fan of coding standards. For me, it makes sense to spend time debating and arguing over them, since it is a valuable contribution to save your time and efforts in the future.

Start with arranging a meeting on what should be in the coding standard. It should be only a face to face meeting, but not over email or via the chat systems. Discuss the rules that you decided to include in your code convention. The rules that are agreed by the majority of the team should be accepted as “mandatory" and other rules can be considered as “optional”.

The code convention guidelines should be reviewed frequently. Rules can be moved from “mandatory” to “optional” and vice versa. If some of them do not work as expected, then they need to be reworked or removed from the guidelines.

Programmers are highly recommended to follow these guidelines during the coding and it should be used as part of the code review which is the next one in our list.

Code Review

The next best thing to pair programming is code review. If you do not practice pair programming then it is recommended to consider at least code review. It is a lightweight process that should be applied as soon as possible after the code is written.

Some of the other subjects listed below are not so obvious but are worth to be considered. Let's continue.

Unit Tests

The next methodology we will talk about is unit testing. Depending on your experience you may or may not have heard something about unit tests, test-driven development or some other type of testing methodology. Usually, these methodologies are applied in the context of large software systems and sometimes in the context of simple web sites.

In computer programming, unit testing is a software development process in which the smallest testable part of source code, called unit, is tested individually and independently to examine whether they are working as expected. This helps you to identify failures in the algorithms and/or logic before the code is released.

One of the benefits that you acquire from creating unit tests is that your team will be motivated to write testable code. Since unit testing requires the appropriate structure of your code it means that code must be divided into smaller more focused functions. Each of which is responsible for a single operation on a set of data rather than on large functions performing a number of different operations.

The second benefit of writing a well-tested code is that you can prevent future failure when the small changes to existing code break functionality. When a failure happens you will be informed that you have written something wrong.

At first, glance, spending time on writing the unit tests during development looks like extra expenses. However, it will save time you might spend on debugging. This should be a step by step process.

Of course, you can not write unit tests for every part of your project but you need to make sure the core components behave as expected. When the project grows you can simply run the tests you have developed to ensure that existing functionality is not broken when new functionality is introduced.

Test-Driven Development

Test-driven development (TDD), also called test-driven design, is a methodology of developing software that combines unit testing, programming, and refactoring of source code. Usually, developers tend to skip the architectural aspect of software development and jump straight into coding. They try to get a rough implementation and only after having a working prototype they think about writing the tests. While this approach can succeed it takes a lot of effort to just make it work.

TDD is one of those practices which contribute to better code quality and decreases bugs. It was introduced as part of a larger software design paradigm known as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), which are types of the Agile software development methodology. TDD helps to produce applications of high quality in less time. Proper implementation of TDD requires the developers and testers to accurately anticipate how the application and its features will be used in the real world.

When it is run as part of a continuous integration cycle with frequent automated builds and tests, the practice is Unit Testing on steroids. In order to apply this methodology, developers need specific training and coaching.

In my understanding of TDD, before coding, you need to know (at least) the starting point. First of all, you need to think of the objects and their behavior to solve the given problem. When doing TDD you start from a test and from your dream vision of how the test would look like.

Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration (CI) is a development practice that requires developers to integrate code into a shared repository several times a day (SVN, Subversion, or Git). Each check-in is verified by the automated tests. Although automated tests are not strictly part of CI, they are usually anticipated. Such an approach allows developers to detect problems earlier and, as a result, solve them faster.

This is a valuable practice by itself. You should focus on setting up a simple Continuous Integration process as early as possible. There are many tools that can help you to set up this process and the most known are Jenkins, Bamboo, and Teamcity. They allow you to automate your software deployment and let you focus on building your product.

Demo Session

The demo review meeting usually takes place close to the end of the Sprint. The purpose of this meeting is to show the other team members, customers, and stakeholders the results of the work team have accomplished over the Sprint.

It may not be immediately visible why it leads to a better code but it will. By regularly showing the source code developers need to keep it close to the release state. With demo meetings on a regular basis, you will have a well-organized process of receiving feedback. And this will give you a better understanding of what was done right and will indicate when something went in the wrong direction.

Now, let's move on and check what are some recommended code quality tools to polish the process.

Tools to Improve Java Code Quality

There is no developer who never made a mistake.

Usually, the compiler catches the syntactic and arithmetic issues and lists out a stack trace. But there still might be some issues that compiler does not catch. These could be inappropriately implemented requirements, incorrect algorithms, bad code structure or some sort of potential issues that the community knows from experience.

The only way to catch such mistakes is to have some senior developer to review your code. Such an approach is not a panacea and does not change much. With each new developer in the team, you should have an extra pair of eyes that will look at his/her code. But luckily there are many tools that can help you control code quality including Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, SonarQube, etc. All of them are usually used to analyze the quality and build some useful reports. Very often those reports are published by continuous integration servers, like Jenkins.

Here is a checklist of Java static code analysis tools, that we use at RomexSoft in most of our projects. Let's review each of them.

Checkstyle

Code reviews are essential to code quality, but usually, no one in the team wants to review tens of thousands of lines of code. But the challenges associated with manually code reviews can be automated by source code analyzers tool like Checkstyle.

Checkstyle is a free and open-source static code analysis tool used in software development for checking whether Java code conforms to the coding conventions you have established. It automates the crucial but boring task of checking Java code. It is one of the most popular tools used to automate the code review process.

Checkstyle comes with predefined rules that help in maintaining the code standards. These rules are a good starting point but they do not account for project-specific requirements. The trick to gain a successful automated code review is to combine the built-in rules with custom ones as there is a variety of tutorials with how-tos.

Checkstyle can be used as an Eclipse plugin or as the part of a built system such as Ant, Maven or Gradle to validate code and create reports coding-standard violations.

PMD

PMD is a static code analysis tool that is capable of automatically detect a wide range of potential bugs and unsafe or non-optimized code. It examines Java source code and looks for potential problems such as possible bugs, dead code, suboptimal code, overcomplicated expressions, and duplicated code.

Whereas other tools, such as Checkstyle, can verify whether coding conventions and standards are respected, PMD focuses more on preemptive defect detection. It comes with a rich and highly configurable set of rules that you can easily configure and choose which particular rules should be used for a given project.

The same as Checkstyle, PMD can be used with Eclipse, IntelliJ IDEA, Maven, Gradle or Jenkins.

Here are a few cases of bad practices that PMD deals with:

Empty try/catch/finally/switch blocks.
Empty if/while statements.
Dead code.
Cases with direct implementation instead of an interface.
Too complicated methods.
Classes with high Cyclomatic Complexity measurements.
Unnecessary ‘if’ statements for loops that could be ‘while’ loops.
Unused local variables, parameters, and private methods.
Override hashcode() method without the equals() method.
Wasteful String/StringBuffer usage.
Duplicated code – copy/paste code can mean copy/paste bugs, and, thus, bring a decrease in maintainability.

FindBugs

FindBugs is an open-source Java code quality tool similar in some ways to Checkstyle and PMD, but with a quite different focus. FindBugs doesn’t concern the formatting or coding standards but is only marginally interested in best practices.

In fact, it concentrates on detecting potential bugs and performance issues and does a very good job of detecting a variety of many types of common hard-to-find coding mistakes, including thread synchronization problems, null pointer dereferences infinite recursive loops, misuse of API methods, etc. FindBugs operates on Java bytecode, rather than source code. Indeed, it is capable of detecting quite a different set of issues with a relatively high degree of precision in comparison to PMD or Checkstyle. As such, it can be a useful addition to your static analysis toolbox.

FindBugs is mainly used for identifying hundreds of serious defects in large applications that are classified into four ranks:

scariest
scary
troubling
of concern

Let's take a closer look at some cases of bugs.

Infinite recursive loop

public String resultValue() { return this.resultValue(); }

Here, the result value() method is called recursive inside itself.

Null Pointer Exception

FindBug examines the code for the statement that will surely cause the NullPointerException.

Object obj = null; obj.doSomeThing(); //code execution will cause the NullPointerException

The below code is a relatively simple bug. If the ‘obj’ variable will contain null and ‘str’ variable has some instance it will surely lead to the NullPointerException.

if((str == null && obj == null) || str.equals(obj)) { //do something }

A method whose return value should not be ignored

The string is an immutable object. So ignoring the return value of the method will be reported as a bug.

String str = "Java"; str.toUpper(); if (str.equals("JAVA"))

Suspicious equal() comparison

The method calls equals(Object) on references of different class types with no common subclasses.

Integer value = new Integer(10); String str = new String(“10”); if (str != null && !str.equals(value)) { //do something; }

The objects of different classes should always compare as unequal, therefore !str.equals(value) comparison will always return false.

Hash equals mismatch

The class that overrides equals(Object) but does not override hashCode() and uses the inherent implementation of hashCode() from java.lang.The object will likely violate the invariant that equal objects must have equal hashcodes.

Class does not override equals in the superclass

Here’s a case: the child class that extends a parent class (which defines an equals method) adds new fields but does not override an equals method itself. Thereby, equality on instances of child class will use the inherited equals method and, as a result, it will ignore the identity of the child class and the newly added fields.

To sum up, FineBug is distributed as a stand-alone GUI application but there are also plugins available for Eclipse, NetBeans, IntelliJ IDEA, Gradle, Maven, and Jenkins. Additional rule sets can be plugged in FindBugs to increase the set of checks performed.

SonarQube

SonarQube is an open-source platform that was originally launched in 2007 and is used by developers to manage source code quality. Sonar was designed to support global continuous improvement strategy on code quality within a company and therefore can be used as a shared central system for quality management. It makes the management of code quality possible for any developer in the team. As a result, in recent years it has become a world’s leader in Continuous Inspection of code quality management systems.

Sonar currently supports a wide variety of languages including Java, C/C++, C#, PHP, Flex, Groovy, JavaScript, Python, and PL/SQL (some of them via additional plugins). And Sonar is very useful as it offers fully automated analysis tools and integrates well with Maven, Ant, Gradle, and continuous integration tools.

Sonar uses FindBugs, Checkstyle and PMD to collect and analyze source code for bugs, bad code, and possible violation of code style policies. It examines and evaluates different aspects of your source code from minor styling details, potential bugs, and code defects to the critical design errors, lack of test coverage, and excess complexity. In the end, Sonar produces metric values and statistics, revealing problematic areas in the source that require inspection or improvement.

Here is a list of some of SonarQube‘s features:

It doesn’t show only what’s wrong. It also offers quality management tools to help you put it right.
SonarQube addresses not only bugs but also coding rules, test coverage, code duplications, complexity, and architecture providing all the details in a dashboard.
It gives you a snapshot of your code quality at a certain moment of time as well as trends of lagging and leading quality indicators.
It provides you with code quality metrics to help you take the right decision.
There are code quality metrics that show your progress and whether you're getting better or worse.

SonarQube is a web application that can be installed standalone or inside the existing Java web application. The code quality metrics can be captured by running mvn sonar:sonar on your project.

Your pom.xml file will need a reference to this plugin because it is not a default maven plugin.

<build> … <plugins> <plugin> <groupId>org.sonarsource.scanner.maven</groupId> <artifactId>sonar-maven-plugin</artifactId> <version>3.3.0.603</version> </plugin> </plugins> … </build>

Also, Sonar provides an enhanced reporting via multiple views that show certain metrics (you can configure which ones you want to see) for all projects. And what’s most important, it does not only provide metrics and statistics about your code but translates these nondescript values to real business values such as risk and technical debt.

Time for conclusions

Over the years of working on different software development projects, we have accumulated our own experience of making the good code better. And here’re things we recommend to do during the whole process to improve the code quality:

Follow the programming language style guide.
Adhere to SOLID principles in your design.
Give descriptive names for methods and variables.
Do not overdesign.
Use design patterns.
Do not reinvent a wheel and use third-party frameworks.
Use efficient data structures and algorithms.
Create Unit tests.
Document all aspects of your project.
Keep all elements of your project under the version control system.

By doing all these points and using the code quality analysis tools in conjunction with development methodology in your everyday programming practices you will eventually create more readable, more thoroughly tested, more likely to run correctly, and much simpler to revise the code. You will also save yourself, your team and your customers from a lot of headaches, time and, therefore, money.

If this is what you would like to experience within all development process, don’t hesitate to contact Romexsoft. We know how to ship quality code and bring the best experience for our clients.

Written by Romexsoft on September 13, 2017
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog 11 Best Practices and Tools to Improve the Java Code Quality

Author: Yura Bondarenko

DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

Serhiy Kozlov — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 13:22:40 +0000

DevOps practices come and go as they are put to a test against real life scenarios. Some prove to be viable, others just don’t bring the results we expect. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the most popular and effective DevOps team structure best practices, so that you can better understand what’s working or not.

DevOps Structure 1: DevOps Inside the Organization

Best suited for: small to mid-sized organizations with a dedicated IT department
Efficiency: Medium

This is the most common DevOp structure for SMBs. It assumes putting one or several DevOps engineers in charge of all the operations and deployment processes. The main drawback here is a possible decrease in software quality during implementation of new changes. This often leads to additional re-work from developers.

DevOps Organization Structure 2: Dev and Ops Collaboration

Best suited for: organizations with a strong tech core
Efficiency: High

Dev and Ops Collaboration is one of the most common team structures and best practices in DevOps. The key here is to ensure fast and effective collaboration between Dev- and Ops-teams. Depending on your needs, you can switch between using only one specialized team or using two teams together. This approach also accommodates having several separate Dev-teams that can work in parallel on partially independent products.

Dev and Ops have seperate, clear functions and effectively collaborate with one another. This means that Ops specialists should feel comfortable working closely with Dev counterparts on issues related to development. Whereas Dev teams should also have a clear understanding of the needs and challenges of the operational teams, mainly those related to deployment.

As well, Ops will be responsible for generating and cultivating new solutions, aimed at reducing the development and deployment times and pass on that information to Devs.

DevOps Structure 3: Dev and Ops Together – the Best Team Structure for IT DevOps

Best suited for: organizations with one digital product
Efficiency: High

This team structure assumes a tight integration between the Dev and Ops teams. They act as a united front, with shared goals and unified product vision. Either of the teams does not have seperate functions. Everyone’s working together to reach a shared goal. Sometimes, this practice is also called “NoOps” as it does not assume having a segregated and visible Ops-team.

Netflix and Facebook – companies developing one digital product – are prime examples of companies using and succeeding with this DevOps practice.

DevOps Organization Structure 4: Оps as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Best suited for: organizations with several different products and services, who already have an established IT Ops department; companies using cloud services.
Efficiency: Medium

Ops as IaaS works best for “cloud-ready” companies using AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure or another cloud services provider.

More read: AWS partner requirements, The Top 5 Application Migration Best Practices

As well, it’s a good approach for organizations with a traditional IT Ops department – one that cannot be completely transformed or replaced fast enough. In this case, an Ops-team acts like Amazon EC2 – a web service that enables the creation of scalable virtual services (instances), along with resizable compute capacity in the cloud.

In this case, we have a seperated “DevOps” team (possibly virtual) operating inside the Dev department. This entity is directly responsible for the following tasks:

Operational features and metrics
Monitoring
Resources provisioning
Handling communications with an IaaS team (optional).

DevOps Structure 5: DevOps as an External Service

Best suited for: small teams and organizations with limited experience in IT operations
Efficiency: Medium

Hiring external DevOps consultants may be useful for smaller companies who want to get a better grasp of the latest best practices in automation, monitoring and configuration management without hiring in-house expertise. Engaging with a reputable DevOps services provider makes perfect sense in this case.

In the future, such organizations will likely move on and adopt structure 1 or structure 3.

DevOps Department Structure 6: DevOps / SRE (Google model)

Best suited for: organizations with mature operations and development culture
Efficiency: High

Some companies (including Google) use a custom model that assumes having a certain practice for transferring software from Dev to an additional team, responsible for further operations called SRE (Site Reliability Engineering).

Under this scenario, SRE team will require development teams to collect and provide relevant logs/metrics, demonstrating that the produced software is robust and up-to-specs.

How Romexsoft Can Help You?

If you are interested in transforming your organization software development best practices, we encourage you to consider our DevOps as Service offering. Engage with AWS-certified DevOps engineers, who can help you effectively develop, automate, deploy and launch your product on AWS. 24/7 NOC support , staff training and adherence to the latest industry best practices are among the few perks you’ll gain.

Written by Romexsoft on September 10, 2019
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

In-House vs. Managed IT Support: How to Capture The Most Benefits

Serhiy Kozlov — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 14:36:55 +0000

The bar for IT support is already high. New-gen startups have made exceptional digital customer experience their central selling point, challenging more traditional companies to keep up the stakes.

However, delivering that support also requires significant capital investments – both financial and human. The wrinkle? Companies now spend billions in recruitment to find the right talent, only to have to replace that talent in a year or so. According to a recent LinkedIn report, the tech sector has the highest turnover rate in every industry sector – 13.2%. Yes, even higher than retail. Even at that giant Amazon, the average tenure of an IT employee is one year.

And it’s not just the clear costs of constantly hiring new talent. What happens to IT projects that are in the works when a critical employee leaves? What about security issues when that critical employee is poached and has proprietary information? This is just one of many reasons why companies of all sizes are increasingly looking to managed service providers (MSP) as a solution to their IT needs.

Should you consider this route as well? Perhaps. Though you should first assess the in-house vs. managed IT and determine which solution indeed matches your company needs.

In-House IT Support

When you have a fully developed internal IT department, your IT infrastructure is physically housed with you. Certainly, there are clear benefits to keeping the staff on-premises as well.

The Benefits of In-House IT Support

There is immediate, face-to-face access when issues arise, and total control over the resolution of those issues.
An in-house team has a deeper understanding of the entire organization, its culture, and its internal infrastructure. This intimate knowledge may make that internal team better equipped to communicate with the key players in all departments for project work and for troubleshooting.
Upper level management just seems to be more comfortable knowing that their IT operations are right there rather than housed “out there,” depending on an MSP and a service level agreement (SLA).

The Drawbacks of In-House IT Support

Recruitment, employment, benefits, and replacement costs – these can put a real dent in any organization’s budget.
Hardware and software costs, including replacement and updates – another big expense to consider.
Security – According to a Harvard Business Review report, the biggest threats to security are internal – disgruntled or compromised employees or just plain inadvertent activities that allow hackers to infiltrate your IT infrastructure. 2018 has been a rocky year security-wise. 2019 will require most companies to take a more proactive stance on cybersecurity.
Innovational bottleneck – assigning the majority of resources to maintenance means that you are hampering your ability to launch new in-house projects as the majority of your efforts are geared towards supporting “what’s already there”. Scaling is complicated as well. You constantly need to engage in a “balancing act” of re-distributing resources between support and execution.

To defray some of these drawbacks, many businesses are now opting for cloud infrastructure, powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This an all-encompassing cloud platform that provides infrastructure, platform, and software packages as services. Cloud migration can significantly reduce the total ownership costs for infrastructure and speed up the productivity of your development teams – considering that you shift to a continuous delivery model post-migration.

To majorly benefit from AWS, however, a company must still have an internal IT staff to manage the migration processes and day-to-day services orchestration. Cloud infrastructure is great, but it is not the “magic bullet” that relieves a company of all of its IT needs. And to gain the flexibility that customized solutions require means internal specialists who are experts in AWS.

Managed IT Support Services

In short, managed IT involves outsourcing your IT needs and services to a strategic partner, who will take on the responsibilities of transforming, running and managing the outsourced business process, in-line with your business goals.

The Benefits of Managed IT Support Services

Employment costs are obviously significantly reduced. Managed it support services involve a predetermined fee to a provider, and that establishes a set amount for your budget, rather than all of the costs of recruitment, replacement, onboarding, and training. You will need a much smaller IT staff to work with that provider, but that’s it.
Overhead costs are reduced. Obviously, hardware and software purchases, update, repairs and maintenance are big budget items, as is the additional space that may be required for a fully staffed in-house IT department. A study conducted by ROI consultancy firm, Alinean, Inc. found that mid- to large-sized companies spend between 4 – 6% of their total budgets on IT. Managed service provider costs can be significantly lower.
Skillsets are always an issue. As businesses need to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology (e.g., data science, AI/ML, blockchain), they must either increase their staffing or provide the necessary training. Managed providers already have teams of pros with these skill sets.
Support. Managed service providers will offer 24/7 IT support and monitoring, so that issues can be addressed quickly and without downtime, because it happens to be after hours or an in-house specialist is ill or on vacation.
Security. There’s a lot to consider here, some of which was covered above. Good providers have strong security measures in place, the means to detect threats and head them off, provide proactive updates and maintenance, and generally take the internal security threats off your table. Around the clock vigilance allows proactive monitoring and rapid incident resolving.

Are there some drawbacks to using a managed service provider? Of course.

The Cons of Managed IT Support Services

It may take some time to do the research and find the right match between your needs and what a service provider can offer.
A service level agreement (SLA) may take time to hammer out, and you will need to have your goals, needs, and budget parameters clearly in mind as you approach negotiations.
There may be some initial discomfort on the part of management when IT services are outsourced. Change can be difficult.

Clearly, using the right managed service provider is a winning solution. Making the move may be a bit time-consuming and uncomfortable at first. It is sort of like sending a child off to school for the first time and giving up “control.” In the end, though, the benefits of managed services far outweigh these initial issues, and a peace of mind gradually settles in.

Romexsoft can provide comprehensive outsourced IT support for AWS environments, helping you to scale and grow your business, while we take care of all your infrastructure needs, acting like an in-house Ops team. We charge a flat-rate fee for our expertise, allowing you to stay on budget and benefit from a convenient and proactive support available round the clock. So let’s have a discussion.

Written by Romexsoft on December 21, 2019

Top 10 AWS services to choose for your business in 2020

Serhiy Kozlov — Fri, 09 Aug 2019 12:35:27 +0000

The universe of Amazon

In the past years, cloud computing has revolutionized the technology industry. With it, tech companies don’t need anymore to make essential investments in hardware and infrastructure; alternatively, they can purchase just the appropriate volume of computing resources to instantly operate their IT departments on the pay-as-yo-go basis.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is genuinely the undisputed pioneer in the cloud computing market who launched the computing services on an as-needed basis. More than 100 efficient services in their extensive portfolio provide a comprehensive list of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, among which are the services for a database, application development, security, infrastructure management, storage, etc.
More read:AWS DevOps tools

AWS services are compatible building blocks for development and deployment of any specific kind of cloud application or expanding the existing cloud environment. AWS products are technologically aligned with each other to bring to life highly scalable and refined products. AWS owns and operates the hardware necessary for maintaining their services.

Benefits of AWS services:

Flexible and scalable IT resources
Considerable cost savings on hardware
Faster innovation
Instant upscaling or downscaling
Quick positioning of necessary resources
Flawless infrastructure

More read: “The Definitive Benefits of AWS Cloud Adoption”

It’s very easy to take the wrong turn with such a vast number of AWS offerings. That’s why we’ve made up a list of the top 10 most popular and in-demand essential AWS services for businesses. We hope this AWS services overview will come in handy on your way to becoming a stronger and more innovative company.

Top 10 must-have AWS services:

Amazon EC2 - Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.
Amazon ELB - Elastic Load Balancing.
Amazon DynamoDB - NoSQL Cloud Databas.
Amazon RedShift - Data Warehouse.
Amazon RDS - Relational Database Service.
Amazon Lambda - Serverless Functions.
Amazon SNS - Simple Notification Service.
Amazon S3 - Redundant File Storage.
Amazon Lex - Conversational Interfaces.
Amazon VPC - Virtual Private.

Amazon EC2

Features: EC2 allows creating virtual machines (instances) and other server management features, like storage, security, ports, with the chosen operating system. There are lots of pre-configured instance templates - AMIs (Amazon Machine Image). In addition, the instances may be configured as per requirement.

Benefits:

Very easy to scale up and down
Integration with other services
Hourly payment
Eliminates the need to deploy costly physical servers
Security and resistibility
Accelerated development and deployment of applications

Amazon ELB

Features: ELB automatically distributes the load between different instances, in other words, if one instance is busy, the other one can handle the large incoming traffic. The service helps avoid any server hotspots. ELB offers three types of load balancers: Application Load Balancer, Network Load Balancer, Classic Load Balancer. ELB ensures only healthy targets receive traffic.

Benefits:

Application performance monitoring
Automatic upscaling or downscaling
Better performance
Fault-tolerant applications
Robust security features
User authentication
Increased availability of an application

Amazon DynamoDB

Features: This completely managed NoSQL cloud database platform ensures storage, processing, and access to data, and supports scale-driven and high-performance applications. It works with document and key-value storage models. Perfect for IoT, ad tech, gaming, and mobile apps. DynamoDB can scale to accommodate large datasets.

Benefits:

Supports mission-critical workloads
Extremely fast
Serverless
Fully managed in-memory cache
Low-latency data access at any scale
Single-digit millisecond response time

Amazon RedShift

Features: This Database-as-a-Service solution is the fastest data warehouse available in the cloud market. It can house petabytes of data and scale up or down according to your requirements. RedShift powers mission-critical analytical workloads. The clusters are fully managed by AWS. The database is compatible with most third-party applications.

Benefits:

Cost-efficient
Fast-performing
Horizontal scaling
Continuous backups
Columnar storage
Massively Parallel Processing (MPP)
Data lake integration

Amazon RDS

Features: This service allows running and managing a relational database without typically having to spend time and considerable resources for its infrastructure management. Databases can be equipped with 5 GB-6 TB in size and can be run on magnetic or solid state storage (SSD). The service can support multiple database engines, like Aurora, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server.

Benefits:

Cost-effective
Fully managed
Highly scalable
Resizeable
Lower administrative burden
Dedicated instances for databases in minutes
Automatic software patching

Amazon Lambda

Features: It is also called Function-as-a-Service (FaaS). You barely have to upload your code virtually for any kind of application or backend service, and Lambda handles everything to run and scale your code with high availability. Supports all types of development tasks. You can execute code functions without the requirement of any EC2 server.

Benefits:

No servers to manage
Zero administration
Pay per run
Helps avoid complexity and management overhead
Automatic scaling of an application

Amazon SNS

Features: Allows sending notifications to users on any platform. The service sends emails, text messages, SQS (Simple queue services), HTML endpoint messages. Enables to decouple microservices, distributed systems, and serverless applications. This service is built for high-throughput, push-based, many-to-many messaging.

Benefits:

High message durability
Fully managed service
Keeps sensitive data secure
Integrates with any type of application (Node.JS, Python, PHP)
Low-cost infrastructure for mass message delivery

Amazon S3

Features:

This is a triple redundant scalable data storage. The data is stored in 3 datacenters in one particular region, which guarantees high data security and adequate protection from failures, errors, and potential threats. This service can be used by companies of all sizes for the storage, retrieval, and protection of any amount of data. The service offers a possibility to manage, classify and report on your data, as well as run big data analytics across your objects.

Objects consist of the data, key (assigned name), and metadata. The objects are stored in “folders”, which can be private or public. The service provides integrations with PCI-DSS, HIPAA/HITECH, FedRAMP.

Benefits:

High data availability
Granular data control
Simple data transfer
Backup and recovery
Incredibly secure infrastructure
Scalability
Almost zero latency
High performance
Easy-to-use management features
Easy integration with third-party applications

Amazon Lex

Features: Lex is an AI service for developing conversational interfaces (voice and text) for any application using the same deep learning technologies that power Amazon Alexa. They are Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU). You can build, test and deploy your chatbots directly from Amazon Lex console. This service enables creating applications with highly engaging user experiences.

Benefits:

Meaningful interactions
Sophisticated deep learning algorithms
Easy-to-use console
You are charged for the text of speech requests
Scales automatically

Amazon VPC

Features: This service has been launched as Amazon’s answer to the increasing number of security threats and data breaches. The service allows creating an isolated space on AWS, and provide access to it only for authorized individuals, groups, or systems. This provides an extra layer of security to the data and resources running under a defined VPC. Your information is absolutely free of exposure.

Benefits:

Effective prevention of data security risk
Possible VPN connections to a corporate network
Ensured accessibility of information
Complete control over the virtual networking environment
Inbound and outbound filtering

Summing up

AWS services are invaluable for businesses directed towards superior agility, continuous innovation, and migration to the cloud. The broad range of services AWS offers can satisfy the most sophisticated requirements of any businesses with any specific goals. AWS services help considerably cut costs on infrastructure management and capital investment into hardware, and reach a quicker time to value. Companies pay exactly for what they use.

Wit Amazon AWS products costly on-premise data centers, which require maintenance and considerable attention, can be replaced with scalable and efficient digital infrastructure. Managed AWS services help upscale or downscale the infrastructure according to the ever-changing business landscape, ensure reliability and security, and maximize revenues.

But you nevertheless have to consider the fact, that not all the AWS services are an appropriate match with each other. You need to have an accurate understanding of which technology stack and the combination of AWS services you need to correctly solve a particular business task.

Have you made up your mind to migrate to AWS and establish a thriving cloud-based business? Don’t have enough cloud expertise in-house?

Romexsoft is a certified AWS consulting partner, and we can help you quickly and securely get a handle on complex AWS environment and mix the precise combination of AWS services with each other according to your business needs. Reach us to get in touch with our acknowledged AWS expert.

Originally published at Romexsoft Blog “ Top 10 AWS services to choose for your business in 2020”

AWS Migration: 3 Major Cost Optimization Strategies to Use

Serhiy Kozlov — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 11:49:45 +0000

Minimize the costs of cloud migration to AWS using proven strategies for cost optimization. Take your business to the cloud within your budget!

Most businesses start considering cloud migration when their in-house systems start posing more challenges than delivering benefits. And most of these challenges come in the form of serious investments in adding hardware, updating software, mitigating disaster potential, or to protect against breaches. The AWS Cost Optimization Model is the ideal solution for business.

The benefits of cloud computing in regards to those hurdles are well-established:

Reduced TOC for infrastructure
Less downtime/higher SLA levels
Instant scalability and capacity for upgrading/downgrading
Business continuity and faster disaster recovery
Enhanced security

What’s even more important is that even small businesses with tight budgets can obtain the same world class cloud solutions as the industry giants – cloud storage, computing, management, and more – and quite literally “pay as they go.” This will give your business unprecedented agility and the ability to compete with larger players in terms of time-to-market and service levels.

The only question becomes which cloud platform provider to use. While there are a number of entrants getting into the business of cloud services, the three main contenders are Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Of these three, AWS is currently the most powerful of the three.

Why AWS Cost Optimization Model?

AWS is considered the “flagship” of cloud services companie. Since the service launched in 2004, it has consistently added new features and services and is still the most comprehensive in terms of offerings (over 100 of them). Among the many benefits are:

Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – scalable computing on demand
Flexibility to choose the source
Scalability – ability to change resources rapidly, and use those resources only when needed
C3: Pay only for storage you use
Redshift solution for backups with no downtime
The latest in security measures, including protection against natural disasters
Automated backups, set up quickly and easily.
Company IT support 24/7
Serverless solutions (Lambda) – pay only while an app is actually working
Codebuild – enabling IT developers to automate server builds. AWS can run unit tests during the build process.

Of course, there are too many benefits to list here, but until the other cloud platforms (Google and Azure) catch up, AWS is the most comprehensive solution, especially if you want to keep the TOC down.

How to Optimize AWS Costs

The key to the most cost-effective use of AWS lies in the responsible use of the services you choose. For example, you may need to scale up to 1,000 instances (servers) for a short-term load, and that will cost much. But if you don’t have a process in place to scale those instances back down during periods of low usage, you are paying for services you don’t need.

One of the best places to start, in terms of cost-effective use of AWS, is with AWS itself. The company has developed, and continually updates, a document called Well Architected Framework – a compilation of best cloud computing best practices that includes hundreds of tips and strategies for cost savings.

Below you will find three comprehensive cost optimization strategies based on those best practices, plus our extensive experience as a managed AWS support partner.

1. Turning Off What is Not in Use

This is the number one cause of avoidable costs. It’s fast and easy to spin up lots of infrastructure, and it is also easy for developers to forget all that they have spun up. And the cost is ticking away.

Locating and then eliminating all of this unused stuff and, even better, preventing the build up in the first place is ideal. Fortunately, AWS has a lot of tools to do this. Here are a few that will have the greatest impact on your price tag:

Breaking down the bill based upon user-defined tags: For every project, the developer must create a “project id=1234” tag, and this tag should be attached to every resource of a project. And tools such as Graffiti Monkey or Janitor Monkey will allow automated tagging and deletion of resources that aren’t tagged right. Then, using the IAM service, certain staff members can view the invoices and even receive alerts when some bills have exceeded the previously defined threshold.
S3 Lifecycle: S3 is basically a dumping ground for files. It continues to expand, allowing an almost unlimited number of files to be added. Using AWS Lifecycle Policies, you can manage your “bucket” of files to save costs. You might have logs to a bucket that you only need for a specific period of time. They need to be deleted after that; other files may be accessed a lot for a period but then not accessed so much. You will want to archive them for some specified time and then delete them. You might want to archive some files from the beginning (e.g. database backups) to meet such things as regulatory compliance. With lifecycle configurations, AWS can be told where and how to transition files into less expensive storage, archive them, or delete them entirely. The way to do all of this is explained in in the AWS Setting Lifecycle configuration on a Bucket. If you don’t do this, you’ll end up paying for junk you no longer need.
Auto-Scaling: A few of AWS services (e.g., EC2 and DynamoDB) let you set up auto-scaling. So the development team define when capacity should expand or shrink, based on predefined metrics. Thus, costs are calculated on that scaling without the need for user intervention.
Optimize Big Data: Redshift offers a huge data warehouse for big data, so that this data can be operationalized and analyzed (as well as backed up, of course). But once the usefulness of the data has been extrapolated, there is no need to keep it there. Move it to a cold storage to secure a cheaper rate. NB: Don’t forget to setup appropriate public cloud configurations to protect all the crucial data you store in the cloud.

2. Use AWS Tools Correctly

The sheer number of tools offered by AWS can be a bit daunting. And often, the easy solution (e.g. EC2) is not the cheapest. Looking at alternatives can pay off. Here are a few examples:

Load Balancing: Before AWS existed, there were any number of open-source load balancing tools, such as Apache. An IT team needs to understand that it can still use these tools, by simply installing them on EC2. And think about this: if you have what is considered a moderate load, you still may need up to 20 instances in a month’s time. You can rack up a hefty bill this way. On the other hand, AWS ELB service is a fraction of the cost, and its automatic features including scaling, patches, and monitoring/alerts. In other words, if there is a managed solution, building it in EC2 is not cost-effective.
EC2 vs. Lambda: Lambda is probably one of the most popular AWS tools, primarily because it costs so much less than EC2. If a developer has custom code to be run on AWS, Lambda could supply a cheaper solution. In fact, the use of EC2 is declining and is now used primarily for installing standalone applications, such as WordPress.
Use “Reservations”: Most of AWS cloud computing solutions allow customers to pay by “reservations.” Reservations are a great method of reserving usage by paying, at highly discounted rates, in advance. So, if you know that you are going to need X number of instances of a certain type over the next several years, you can purchase them now and save a bundle.
Bandwidth Costs: Bandwidth is a cost that is not necessarily cheaper through AWS than what you would pay in-house. But it will be important to do the research to keep this cost as low as possible. Costs will vary with the AWS services you are using. Redshift, for example, has a relatively expensive bandwidth cost, while ELB has some of the cheapest. AWS does have tools to help keep costs down, including Direct Connect, CloudFront geo-fencing, and Snowball.

3. Be Realistic with Planning

While planning can sometimes be the “bane of an organization’s existence,” this is not the case when using AWS cloud services.

More read: Application migration best practices

Because AWS is heavily focused on self-service, organizations must establish and implements standards and plans. And the larger the enterprise, the more important this is. There must be cost controls and complete visibility relative to costs. Here are a few “must-do’s.”

Establish a tagging topology that is company-wide. These are simple metadata the can be associated with every resource. The key to tagging is that you will be able to separate costs out and see where costs may be more than they should be. And then you can begin the analysis to see how costs can be cut.
Plans for Deployment. One of the best things about AWS is that you have so many options to do the same thing. And everyone must be on the same page, if you are to determine costs and which cost thresholds are being exceeded. You can use tools such as Jenkins for deployment and, for maintenance, Chef, Puppet, or Ansible.
Backup and Data Recovery: any plan must include backup and recovery simulations for testing. This has always been done on-site, and it must also be done with AWS. AWS infrastructure changes occur rapidly, so recovery plans should be reviewed on a regular basis. There may be cost savings in changing out your backup and recovery options.

Our AWS case study: Pilot Light Disaster Recovery Solution on AWS

How Can We Help

Optimizing costs through AWS use is, as you can see, a challenging task. It requires consistent review of services, new options, and comparison of costs within AWS professional services and tools. Indeed, a small team could spend most of their days on this task alone.

More Read:AWS: Overview of Security Processes Whitepaper, Top 10 AWS Cloud Migration Tools

Romexsoft is here to provide a deep audit of your cloud infrastructure and show you where cost savings can be achieved. We provide custom solutions based on your needs and budget – tagging topologies, billing alerts, monitoring and adjusting all strategies, architectures, and plans, and full backup and recovery testing, as well as 24/7 AWS tech support services. Get in touch today to discover how we can reduce your AWS bill!

Written by Romexsoft on April 23rd, 2019
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog “AWS Migration: 3 Major Cost Optimization Strategies to Use”

Java 8 Vs. Java 9: Get Ready for a New Era

Serhiy Kozlov — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 15:43:54 +0000

The average business owner just wants his software or apps to work stable. He either has in-house developers, or he outsources. Either way, he determines what he wants a new software to do, conveys that to his developers, and expects them to come through. What he has a right to expect is a custom solution, designed specifically for his company, that, with some training and support, will meet his expectations for performance.

More often than not, this means that developers turn to Java, a programming language with amazing versatility. Today, there are more than 6.5 million Java developers globally, because of its utility, ease of use, security, reliability, and the platform independence (it works no matter what the hardware or the operating system is in use).

Why Java and Java 9?

Java was developed by Sun Microsystems in 1995, originally designed for interactive television. When Java 1.0 was released publicly, however, it had shifted focus to Internet use. And it became one of the most popular programming languages for all of the elements listed above.

Obviously, there have been many updates since 1.0. The latest version is Java 8, in the process of being replaced by Java 9. Oracle announced the Java 9 release date of September 22, 2016, with a rolling out of new features and elements over the next 16 months. That date has been moved to March and now to July, 2017 for a number of reasons, but primarily because the developers want to take extra time to ensure that bugs and issues are fixed before the release – something that was not done with the release of Java 8.

Java 9 has been a long time coming, and here’s why. When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2010, Java was kind of on hold during the long purchasing process. It lost a lot of talent. Oracle had to rebuild a Java development team, which then began the process of revising and the long-desired modularization.

There are lots of features of Java 9 that have developers pretty excited. And these new features will have important implications for businesses that want fast, efficient and robust custom software solutions.

New Features of Java 9: Quick Summary

While much of this may not mean a great deal to a business owner, the new features of Java 9 have lots of meaning for developers, as they look at what’s new. Here is an overview of four of the most important.

Jshell: This is a new command line tool. It means that if a developer wants to run just a few lines of Java as a standalone, it can be done without having to wrap it all in a separate method or project.
Microbenchmarks: Now, the performance of very specific and small pieces of code can be measured with a standardized method. The Java harness (JMH) for analyzing down to nanoseconds is unique to Java 9.
Full Support for HTTP 2.0 Client: This is a speed thing, and HTTP 2.0 Client has shown to provide greater speed, ranging from 11.81% to 47.7% over HTTP 1.1 Client.
Process API: An API (application programming interface) allows app’s processes communicate with each other without using native code. This update in Java 9 will extend the ability of Java in controlling and managing OS processes.
Modular Source Code: Organizes JDK source code into modules.

That sounds promising, isn't it?

From rational perspective the most awaited feature for me is the new HTTP Client that supports both HTTP/2 protocol and WebSocket. And here’s why:

Non blocking mode support (many threads per request/response).

Enhanced performance (by 45% in comparison to HTTP/1.1) that will be on par with Netty or Jetty.

Server push support which will make possible to push resources to the client without an explicit request.

The second feature (less important though the cute one) I’m looking forward to is the Streaming API improvement, especially the dropWhile and takeWhile methods that will be very useful in functional programming.
-- Ivan, Senior Java Developer at Romexsoft

Comparison of Java 8 and Java 9

Java 8 features have given developers remarkable versatility and the ability to provide software solutions to a wide variety of business sectors, including fintech, healthcare, and other industries.

The coming of Java 9, however, promises to deliver even more versatility and the ability to customize even further. For businesses, this is a huge plus.

Here, in rather simplistic terms, are just some new features of Java 9 that Java 8 did not have.

The Reason for the Title “Jigsaw”

Project Jigsaw is the modularization of Java. Basically, it means that programming code is broken up and organized into modules based upon the tasks that those modules execute. By doing this, modules are reusable and far easier to manage and debug. This means that software development becomes easier, more streamlined, and debugged faster. This is a key difference between Java 8 and Java 9.

The second big benefit - it makes the Java Platform more lightweight and more scalable. It allows Java applications to run even on devices with low productivity (requires less resource to work).

The latest Java 8 release brought a variety of new features that significantly changed developer's life. But what's more, Oracle prepares to release Java 9 with a bunch of new groundbreaking ones. For me, the most anticipated feature of Java 9 is Jigsaw project which introduces a new module system that breaks the JRE into interoperable components. With a modular JRE, applications will be enabled to run on even embedded systems. This is an especially huge change in the context of the advent of Internet of Things (IoT). It carries forward Java and it means we have a chance to have a big number of IoT apps written in Java.
-- Yura, Senior Full Stack Java Developer at Romexsoft

The Jshell Command Line Tool

As mentioned above, this is an interactive tool that will allow testing of small snippets of code rather than requiring the creation of a new class. This new shell also comes with history and auto-completion features as well as other functionalities, like saving and loading some or all written statements.

Multi-Resolution Image

This API will allow the encapsulation of a set of images that all have different resolutions into a single object. Thus, a developer can retrieve an image that is resolution-specific or retrieve all variants within the image.

Unified JVM Logging

Now there is a common logging system for all JVM components. However, if we look at pros and cons of Java 9, here is one. It doesn’t add logging calls from all JVM components and doesn’t add logging to Java code in the Java Development Kit.

Publish-Subscribe Framework

This is an improvement over Java 8, as these interfaces will better support the interoperability of a number of asynchronous systems that run on JVM’s (Java Virtual Machines). The idea behind JVM’s is that they allow any computer to run a Java program, by converting Java code into machine language and then executing it. Improvements in this area are one of the big advantages of Java 9.

Immutable List, Set, Map, and Map.Entry API

In Java 8, to create a collection of several elements, a developer had to create several lines of code. Now it can be accomplished in a single line of code. One of the time-consuming disadvantages of Java 8 has thus been eliminated.

I’m expecting the Stream API Improvements. Why? It will facilitate the work with arrays and accelerate various functions. As an example, check this: Stream.of(1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10).takeWhile(i -> i < 5 ).forEach(System.out::println); Will deliver: 1 2 3 4 Looks promising, isn't it?
-- Mykhaylo, Team Lead at Romexsoft

Benefits of Java 9 For Businesses

Granted, the details of Java 8 vs. Java 9 may not be of huge interest to the business looking for the best software solutions to meet its needs. To the developer, however, there will be a significant difference between Java 8 vs. Java 9 performance in creating those software solutions.

Whether using Java SE 9 or any other version, dependent upon the business need, the inclusion of the latest features will bring about improvements in the following:

Greater speed of development, specifically due to the system of modules which are reusable and much easier to debug and to manage.
One more benefit of the system of modules is that it will improve the resource effectiveness of applications (small or big ones) as for their development programmers will need to take only needed modules instead of all JRE.
Creation of sets using a single rather than several lines of code.
Microbenchmarks that will allow performance analysis of very small pieces of code.
Support for HTTP 2.0 Client – greater speed.

And this is just a partial list. But all of these and the other new features make the developer’s job of designing the roadmap for a custom business solution and then creating the software based upon that roadmap more streamlined. That streamlining of developing, testing and debugging means that the final product will have far fewer issues that need to be addressed. In this type of development environment, everyone wins.

If you are looking for expertise in software solution development, we invite you to contact Romexsoft, present your need, and allow us to provide you with an overview of how we can meet that need through our current Java 8 expertise and the use of Java 9 features that are soon rolling out. We are ready and embracing this new era of Java!
Author: Yura Bondarenko
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog “Java 8 Vs. Java 9: Get Ready for a New Era”

9 Must-Have Tools for Managing an Offshore Development Team

Serhiy Kozlov — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 09:39:10 +0000

You are likely managing internal teams. And if you are good at what you do, then you already know how to manage a team effectively. If your organization is made up of several teams, you have team leaders. You communicate with them regularly, to get updates on progress, to resolve issues, and to provide resources when necessary. Some of this communication may be digital. Some of it may be in person.

We will talk about the best tools that will help dedicated software development team.

So if you are now going to manage a remote development team for the first time, do not panic. You have the skills. In fact, you already know how to manage a team effectively. You’ll just need to make certain adjustments. There will be a local project manager and you’ll set up goals, objectives, parameters and timelines, just as always.

The Difference Between Managing Offshore Teams and In-House Teams

One thing that may change is the set of digital tools you will be using. It’s one thing to be able to walk down the hall and speak with someone about an important detail. It’s another thing when you are thinking about how to handle an offshore team in Ukraine, for example.

Take only the aspect of meetings. Internally, you sit down with your team leader or perhaps have meetings with an entire team. Now all of a sudden, you need to manage an offshore development team in Ukraine, half a world away. How will the meetings occur?

This is just one example of when you need the team management tools. What follows is a list of other tools for managing a remote team that you may find quite useful. Even if you are a non-techy, they’ll be user-friendly and will keep everyone on point. These are by no means the only tools for the purposes stated. But they are solid and deserve a look.

Top Project Management Tools

Atlassian JIRA

Source: Atlassian JIRA

JIRA is a project management tool specifically designed for software development teams and agile project management. In fact, it is probably the best and most comprehensive on the market.

You may not know or understand terms such as “agile development” or agile frameworks like “Scrum” or “Kanban” just yet, but your remote development team will. It has probably used JIRA numerous times. The beauty of this tool for you is that it provides a complete picture of your project, who is doing what, and how they are collaborating to complete it. If your remote PM is using this team management software, you are in good hands.

Think about this: JIRA is used by such companies as Square, eBay, Cisco and Airbnb.

Trello - one of Top Project Management Tools

Source: Trello

Chances are you are familiar with Trello, but if not, it is pretty much on the top of the list of collaboration tools for internal team project work. Tasks are listed and delegated, and the boards that are devised with the task cards visually depicted. Everyone can see what everyone else has completed, what they are currently working on, and projected timelines for completion. In software development, everything must be sequenced, and Trello keeps everyone in sync.

Additionally, you can use it to manage your own chores and create cards for various actions you need to accomplish to get the project moving - such as provide feedback on the recent demo, send out the brand guidelines for design and so on.

Slack

Source: Slack

Here is a great cloud-based communication tool for daily conversations. Send direct messages, make calls, drop files, images, documents, etc. right on in for sharing, and add comments to others’ communications.

One reason why Slack is such a popular tool is that separate channels can be set up for each project or for small groups. Messages can go to the entire team, to just a few, or an individual. As far as tools for remote teams, this is great work chat app.

Skype

Source: Skype

Online communication made easy - local, national and international. Skype allows video, audio, or messaging all in one. Whether you need to conference with your remote PM individually or with the entire team in a conference setting, this is one of the top remote collaboration tools for business. You’re good to go on any Microsoft supported device.

Google Drive

Source: Google Drive

This is your answer to online file storage that can be accessed from your computer, tablet or smartphone and shared with whom you like. Store legal documents and any amendments that may have been added; store images, drawings, designs – even recordings and videos.

It’s really great for you and remote teams, especially when everyone is not in the same location and needs to access files or docs. That’s the thing about techies – they may have greater productivity at the local coffee shop or at 3:00 a.m. With access to the work files from Google Drive, it’s not a problem.

Bitbucket - one of Top Project Management Tools

Source: Bitbucket

Another product from Atlassian (JIRA mentioned above), Bitbucket is the solution for storing source files, sharing them by permission, and allowing team members to collaborate on every step of the development process, from coding to deployment.

It is web-based so users can access it from anywhere and is for projects that use two revision control systems – Mercurial or Git. While you won’t understand the technical aspects of this tool, suffice it to say that developers love it because is securely stores their source files and allows collaboration from anywhere.

GitHub - one of Top Project Management Tools

Source: GitHub

GitHub is Bitbucket close cousin. It’s another popular service used by developers to store, share and collaborate on source code files. You may know GitHub as a popular open source platform, but it also allows storing private projects for a fee unlike Bitbucket that charges per user.

Additionally, this app syncs effectively with popular automated testing tools such as Jenkins, meaning that your developers can write and check the code simultaneously.

By the way, at Romexsoft we use both options, Bitbucket and GitHub, for different projects. If you don’t know what to choose for your needs we can easily advise you.

Balsamiq

Source: Balsamiq

Wireframing is a task that occurs early on in a development project. Basically, it is visual layout for content and functionality. Balsamiq mockups are easy and make short work of wireframing, acting like a whiteboard for sketching. Developers can sketch their ideas, erase what doesn’t work, replace, remodel, and come up with their best solutions, based upon user needs and navigation. And you can do the same whenever you need to illustrate certain points to your team, outline user flows or give some feedback on the design. Balsamiq is really simple to use.

Screencast-O-Matic

Source: Softonic

When you or someone from the team wants to illustrate concepts, create media, and share that collaboratively with other team members, on a permission basis, Screencast-O-Matic is a great option. Working on their own screens, individuals can capture any digital content they have, and then share it for others to analyze and respond to. It’s a good storage solution that also archives every piece and every revision that has been made.

Not a Comprehensive List

This is not a comprehensive list by any means. There are other tools out there that will perform the same functions. If you are a techie and plan to be technically involved with your offshore team, then you already know that these are solid tools for managing a development team.

If you are not tech-savvy, you now have an idea of what tools are probably necessary to develop the software you want. Further, you have a layman’s idea of what these tools do. This will allow you to ask the right questions as you have those initial discussions with an offshore team you are considering. You will want to be certain that your Project Manager has the tools in place that experienced and proficient development teams use.

Romexsoft would be happy to advise you on the best management tools to use and create an effective product development roadmap, based on your current needs!

Written by Romexsoft on March 7th, 2018
Originally published at Romexsoft Blog “9 Must-Have Tools for Managing an Offshore Development Team”

AWS vs Google Cloud vs Azure: Which One is The Best For Your Business?

Serhiy Kozlov — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 11:17:59 +0000

A detailed analysis of the top three cloud platforms with a comparison chart and additional insights for building a strong case for cloud migration.

Migrate to the cloud! This is the common IT advice you probably hear in regards to optimizing existing infrastructure and reducing TOC.

Indeed, today 73% of businesses already have at least one application, or part of their infrastructure in the cloud. The boldest predictions even go as far as indicating that in one year, 83% of enterprise workloads will reside in the cloud.

The stakes are high: migrating to the cloud is the easiest way to innovate your business and deploy new competitive services. Cloud services also offer greater flexibility with instant resource scaling; higher SLA levels and a smoother path towards maintaining business continuity even when disaster strikes. Hence, it should come as no surprise that over a third of IT departments are pressured to migrate 100% to the cloud platform.

However, cloud migration should not be viewed as a “trendy” thing to do. There are multiple facets that should be carefully considered to successfully bring your initiative to life and gain the benefits. Choosing the optimal cloud services provider to match your business needs will be a major step in that direction.

Cloud Migration: What’s In It for Your Business?

Today, there are three major cloud services providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure. AWS currently holds the largest (51%) share of the IaaS/PaaS market, while the cloud platform from Google – a newer entrant in the space – has the lowest market share of just 6% per Market Watch report.

While all vendors offer the same general cloud services, there are some differences to consider, as companies make their decisions on cloud computing.

In terms of general services and benefits, all three cloud providers can help your business capture the next cloudification benefits:

As companies scale, developing more software, apps, infrastructure, etc., their existing hardware becomes stressed. They have two choices – 1) continue to acquire more hardware, at a significant cost, and then employ additional staff to maintain the additional hardware and systems, or 2) use a cloud storage system to house growing infrastructure, software, apps, etc.
Moving to the cloud means that current IT staff can focus on more productive endeavors, such as development, instead of on-prem infrastructure maintenance. You can outsource IT support 24/7 to a managed services provider.
The migration of sensitive information to a cloud-based system (think health and financial information), means that there are far fewer risks of such data being compromised. One of the biggest causes of breaches is employee negligence, especially personal use of company computers. Another risk is outside vendors, such as the one responsible for the Target data breach several years ago. Today, even public cloud configurations can be customized to meet the top security standards and compliance requirements.
If natural disasters or other events cause systems to crash, having software, data, and apps, etc. in the cloud means that nothing is lost. Work can go on uninterrupted. Up until this time, organizations had to find remote physical facilities at which to store their data.

The Top Cloud Providers 2019: AWS vs Google Cloud vs Azure cloud comparison 2019

All three companies are strong contenders for businesses. However, you should understand that different tech strengths and backgrounds have molded the companies’ approaches to delivering cloud solutions and complementary functionality.

AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure cloud offerings come with a set of different advantages in terms of features, pricing and tech offerings as further illustrated in the comparison chart.

	AWS	Google Cloud	Azure
Compute Resources	EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) – cutting-edge solution for managing virtual machines. Comes with pre-configured, yet customizable settings.CPU Limits: 1-40 CPU Memory Limits: 0.5-244 GB	GCE (Google Compute Engine) – operate similarly to AWS.CPU Limits: 1 Shared-32 dedicated CPU Memory Limits: 0.6-208 GB	Virtual Machines (VMs) – easy-to-configure, manage and deploy. Can maintain OS and other server software.CPU Limits: 1-32 CPU Memory Limits: 0.75-448 GB
Server management services	AWS Systems Manager: Gain better visibility into all groups of resources and set up automations.	N/A	Azure Operational Insights: Essential operational data analysis.
Storage	Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service).Key advantage: you can physically ship data to the company for uploading. Costs: From $0.023 per GB Per month	Google Cloud StorageKey advantage: allows resumable data uploads.Costs: From $0.007 – $0.014 per GB/month/	Azure Blob StorageKey advantage: excellent for hosting large unstructured data (up to 5 TB per item). Costs: From $0.002 per GB for hot storage and from $0.01 per GB per month for cold storage
Scaling	AWS Auto Scaling	Using managed instance groups	Azure Autoscale and Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Logging & monitoring	Amazon CloudWatch: real-time visibility and analytics for apps and infrastructureAWS CloudTrail: Logging and monitoring of AWS accounts	Google StackDriver –monitoring, logging, error reporting, tracing and debugging	Azure Monitor – Log Analytics(log data collection and insights) plus Application Insights(Application Performance Management platform)
Disaster recovery	Provides a set of cloud-based disaster recovery services	Does not offer ready-to-use DR solutions	Site Recovery (DRaaS)
Analytics & Big Data	AWS Elastic MapReduce (EMR), a robust managed Hadoop, Spark and Presto solution. Can be integrated with a number of AWS services.	Cloud Dataproc – fully managed Hadoop and Spark service.Has a seperate Machine Learning platform for training and hosting Tensorflow models. Cloud Dataflow – develop custom data processing pipelines.	Cortana Intelligence – includes Apache platform HDInsight that can be equipped with Hadoop, Spark, Storm or HBase. Real-time data can be processed with Stream Analytics.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud comparison

Amazon has been the market leader for a while as the company was among the first to offer cloud computing solutions and now has almost every feature available in the industry.

One of the biggest benefits of AWS is that it can serve organizations of any size. Big boys such as Netflix and Expedia rely on AWS to deliver services globally. And yet, small businesses can find everything they need too. Among the pros of Amazon are the following:

Pricing is based on amount of use, rather than a set fee. Smaller businesses find this attractive. Storage is customizable and, again cost is based on amount
Scaling is easy with AWS – it can support almost unlimited numbers of users – perhaps the reason for Netflix’s choice.
There’s lots of flexibility, customization and support for third-party integrations – virtually any organization can be served through AWS.
Real-time analytics and big data solutions are available through Amazon’s proprietary Kinesis Streams and Firehose. You will need a small development team to help you set up those.
Updates and continued new features are attractive, as this platform continues to assess client needs and pain points.

More read List of AWS services, List of AWS cloud migration tools and services

Google Cloud Platform cloud comparison

Google prides itself in offering a wide variety of products and services to companies of all sizes. Most notable are computing, networking, storage, big data, and machine learning. One of its greatest strengths is in data management, especially for applications.

Here are the pros:

Data analytics and storage are very attractive to users, and ML services are quite advanced
Integrates easily with all other Google services
There is a free package although it is quite limited, and highly discounted prices for a long-term contract
Special arrangements are easily negotiated.

Microsoft Azure cloud comparison

Like AWS, Azure offers virtual machines that have some custom configurations. Two options are available – Azure SQL and Cloud SQL. Analytics are available through Cortana, and real-time data is processed through its proprietary Stream Analytics. Obviously, it integrates perfectly with any other Microsoft products.

Among its pros are the following:

Azure is an almost “out of the box” solution – the set up is easy.
If an organization has Microsoft products, integration with Azure VM’s is almost seamless.
It offers a variety of pricing, based on client needs.
Azure guarantees no more than 4.38 hours of downtime per year.
Its biggest strength is speed.

Calculating The Cost of Cloud Solutions

Of course, there is cost involved. But when it is weighed against the costs of in-house solutions, there is really no comparison.

All cloud services companies will charge upfront fees to migrate your data to the cloud. After that, there will be subscription fees that are ongoing, based on the cloud platform provider tier you choose. Costs also vary upon the amount that you migrate now and as you add more computing in the future. Your best bet is to use a service that has a pay-as-you-use system in place.

And costs will always be calculable up-front. Before you make a decision.

AWS pricing Resources:

Google Cloud Pricing Resources:

Microsoft Azure Pricing Resources:

Top Cloud Providers 2019 - Conclusions

Deciding among these three cloud services providers is a serious business choice. At Romexsoft, we continue to believe that AWS holds the edge in cloud service providers. It is feature-rich, supports organizations of any size, and is both customizable and highly scalable. Further, it continues to develop and offer new features.
More read: Application migration best practices
When you are ready to migrate, Romexsoft is here to assist you with your AWS set-up, customization, and ongoing managed support of your AWS infrastructure. Let us evaluate your needs and move you one step closer to the cloud!

Written by Romexsoft on March 13th, 2019

Originally published at Romexsoft Blog “AWS vs Google Cloud vs Azure: Which One is The Best For Your Business?”

DEV Community: Serhiy Kozlov

The SaaS Application Development Lifecycle

The SaaS Development Life Cycle Begins With The Vision

Developing the Plan

The Subscription Stage

The Development Stage

1. Selection of a Software Development Methodology

2. SaaS Will Mean HTML5 (at least for desktops)

3. SaaS Requires Published API’s

4. Multi-Tenancy Issues

5. SaaS and Stateless Architecture

6. SaaS Upgrades – Frequent and Non-Disruptive

7. Redundancy and High Availability Level

8. Operations – Requirements for Development

SaaS Implementation Methodology and Deployment

SaaS Development, Operations, and Management are Unique

You Have Another Option

When and Why Java is Suitable for Application

Using Java For Web Applications

General Advantages of Using Java for Business Applications

Specific Advantages of Programming With Java

“Write Once, Use Anywhere”

Multithreading

Memory Management is Another Big Advantage

Scalability

Finding Next-Gen Java Development

The Future of Java Development

Amazon Polly – Text-to-Speech

What’s Cool about Amazon Polly?

Niche Use Cases

Two New Amazon Polly Features Worth of Your Attention

How Amazon Polly Powers Trinity Player

How Romexsoft Can Help You?

Top 10 AWS Cloud Migration Tools and Services

Why Migrate to AWS?

What is Migration Software?

List of the top 10 must-have AWS cloud migration tools and services:

Read more about the best AWS cloud migration tools

1. AWS Cloud Adoption Readiness Tool (CART)

2. TSO Logic

3. Cloud Endure

4. BMC Discovery

5. Turbonomic

6. New Relic Software Analytics

7. Dynatrace

8. Attunity CloudBeam

9. AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP)

10. AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform

Why the Right Migration Tools Matter

How Romexsoft Can Help You?

11 Best Practices and Tools to Improve the Java Code Quality

What is a Software Development Methodology?

Pair Programming

Coding Conventions

Code Review

Unit Tests

Test-Driven Development

Continuous Integration

Demo Session

Tools to Improve Java Code Quality

Checkstyle

PMD

FindBugs

Infinite recursive loop

Null Pointer Exception

A method whose return value should not be ignored

Suspicious equal() comparison

Hash equals mismatch

Class does not override equals in the superclass

SonarQube

Time for conclusions

DevOps Team Structure and Best Practice

DevOps Structure 1: DevOps Inside the Organization

DevOps Organization Structure 2: Dev and Ops Collaboration

DevOps Structure 3: Dev and Ops Together – the Best Team Structure for IT DevOps

DevOps Organization Structure 4: Оps as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

DevOps Structure 5: DevOps as an External Service

DevOps Department Structure 6: DevOps / SRE (Google model)

How Romexsoft Can Help You?

In-House vs. Managed IT Support: How to Capture The Most Benefits