The Ops Community ⚙️: Divyessh Maheshwari

Web 3.0 and Decentralization

Divyessh Maheshwari — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 08:07:58 +0000

Have you ever wondered how does the blockchain works? or what are the tokens or cryptocurrencies on a fundamental level? or why NFTs are non-fungible?

In this post, we are going to explore what really is Web 3.0, and also understand some basics of decentralization and blockchains. We will also take a look at what smart contracts and tokens are, and at last, we are also going to learn how are these cryptocurrencies implemented and what really makes the NFTs authentic.

Introduction

In order to understand these concepts of Web3we first need to know what is Web 2.0, and how it is any different. Web 2.0 is the World Wide Web based on the concepts of social media, where the user can create content, post it online, and engage with other user-generated content. But the upcoming issue was that they did not own this content or the revenue being generated by it. The company that provided the platform for sharing the content has the maximum ownership of the revenue generated by that content. This led to the centralization of the data and traffic influence.

Centralization

Let us say I start my own social media application. I create a great user interface, and a strong and secure backend interface as well. So if any of you join my social media application, and start posting content on it, it will be stored in a database I set up, and only I have the access to. This means that I have the maximum control over your data, and hence I also own the benefits and revenue I generate from this. Not only this, but I am also in control of making any decisions for your data. For example, I can decide that I no longer want to store your data in a relational database and migrate it to a NoSQL database, and you as a user will not be able to restrict this decision. This is known as centralization.

Centralisation or centralization (see spelling differences) is the process by which the activities of an organisation, particularly those regarding planning and decision-making, framing strategy and policies become concentrated within a particular geographical location group. This moves the important decision-making and planning powers within the center of the organisation. ~ Wikipedia

We can also say this as when one node or a group of nodes are in control of governance in a system, the system is centralized. Nodes are just systems on a network. Like in the social media application example above, all the systems of users using the application as well as the main server are nodes on the network.

Decentralization

Decentralization is when no node or a particular group of nodes has a central control or governance over all the other nodes. This does not necessarily mean that no node has any control over the network, rather it means that all nodes have equal control and access to the network, and changes made on one node affect the whole system. For example, if our social media application above was decentralized, the complete data would have been stored on each and every user's system, and whenever one user made a change to this data, maybe by uploading a pic, the same change would have taken place on all the nodes. Because of this method of ensuring the decentralization of the network, also called consensus , the decentralized systems require a lot of computing power and resources.

Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Web 3.0

Web 3.0, unlike Web 2.0 — which generally has a centralized system, has a decentralized distributed system. That means that all the nodes on the system in Web 3.0 have equal control and access. One of the key features of Web 3.0 is that it implements Smart Contracts and Token using the blockchain mechanism. Let us understand what the terms I just used mean.

Blockchain

Blockchain, in simple words, is a type of distributed database, which means that data is not stored on a centralized server, and rather is stored as a distributed system. We will not be discussing distributed systems in this post, but I will surely create a post on the topic in the future. The data in the blockchain is stored in groups called blocks. Once the capacity of a block is filled, they are linked to the previous blocks which form a chain of these blocks called a blockchain.

The significance of this blockchain mechanism is that the data in these are immutable which makes the record stored in these authentic.

Blockchain Networks

Now in order to give equal control and access to this blockchain, there needs to be a copy of this blockchain on all the nodes, and these nodes together form the blockchain network. The major thing to ensure is that all blockchains have the same data and no one manipulates adding fake data to the chain. To ensure this, the algorithms developed are called blockchain consensus, and they make these networks almost impossible to corrupt.

Smart Contracts

Smart contracts can be understood as programs stored on any blockchain network which get executed automatically whenever the terms present in the contract are met. For example, I can create a smart contract that helps me store a variable and get this variable. I can deploy it on any blockchain of my choice, and depending on the chain I choose, I will have to pay a gas fee for making changes to this blockchain. Once I do that, the contract will be registered on the chain, and anyone with access to this can update or read this variable.

Tokens

Tokens are assets developed on existing blockchain networks that have a limited total supply on the chain. These are often confused as being the same as cryptocurrencies, but even though they share many similarities, they differ as the cryptocurrencies are native to the blockchain, which means that each cryptocurrency has its own blockchain network. At the same time, the token is created on an existing blockchain network. For example, I can declare a token named “DToken” and limit its supply to 50 tokens, and publish it on the blockchain network of my choice. Then a record on the blockchain has been created that states that I own 50 “DTokens”. Now, initially, Tokens do not have a monetary value, but for the sake of this example, let us say that I manage to create a demand for my token in the market, and it gets valued at 6 USD per token, so now I can trade this token for different items like I can purchase two 3$ coffees and pay them using my token, given that the person wants to trade my token at that price. Cryptocurrencies work in a very similar way.

Web 3.0 is the revolutionized web because of incorporating the concepts of Tokens and Blockchain Networks. This helps add a feature of ownership to any data present on the web. The consensus of these networks also helps ensure the authenticity of this data, promoting decentralization to a great extent. This has helped develop many new concepts such as NFTs and DeFi(Decentralized Finance).

Photo by Andrey Metelev on Unsplash

NFTs (Non-Fungible Token)

NFTs are tokens that follow the ERC 721 standard. Unlike other tokens, NFTs are Non-Fungible which means each NFT is unique and cannot be copied or mutated. Just like any other token, we can create digital assets as NFTs, and trade them for other tokens or cryptocurrencies.

Let us see how this works and how NFTs are different from other tokens and cryptocurrencies.

So, I create a digital asset, let us say a small image of size 1 kb. Now if I publish this asset as a token, and limit the supply to 5 tokens, each token is going to be identical to the other, meaning each token will be equivalent to the other. On the other hand, if I mint this asset as an NFT, and I mint 5 of these NFTs, each of them will have a unique token id, which can be used to track its ownership details. If I trade an NFT in the future, any person with access to blockchain data can track the original owner of that particular NFT back to me. This is what makes these Non Fungible.

Conclusion

Web 3.0 and Decentralization are getting more and more popular every day. Big giants like Meta, Google, and Apple are getting involved in the development of Metaverse, which is a super application of this Web 3.0. This has the potential to lead to a completely digital world, where all the transactions and assets will be stored on blockchain networks. It can digitalize the whole financial system of the world, and it is already progressing in that direction very quickly.

I hope you enjoyed this article, to stay updated subscribe to my newsletter on my official blog site: Thinkfeed.

Serverless Architecture

Divyessh Maheshwari — Thu, 05 May 2022 05:58:00 +0000

Have you ever wondered how the AWS Lambda functions or Cloud Functions by Google or other Functions as a Service work? or is serverless architecture really serverless? or how a third-party service manages your complete backend service code in containers?

In this post, we are going to understand the serverless architecture and how it actually works. We are also going to explore the answer to the question, is serverless architecture really serverless? and we are also going to explore how this architecture is provided in handy to us by different cloud providers like AWS, GCP, and many others. We will also take a look at what is FaaS (Function as a Service) and how we can actually implement a FaaS using any of these cloud providers.

To have a better understanding of this article, I really recommend you to read one of my previous articles on “Basics of Web App Architecture” and if you want to know more about the cloud, check out “Cloud Computing”. In case you already have an understanding of how the web works and what are some different commonly used web architectures, feel free to move ahead.

Introduction

Serverless architecture is one of the modern forms of web architecture where we deploy our application that incorporates the third-party services that manage the server configurations, load balancing, and other server-side tasks.

The distribution of the services that need to be provided in the backend is somewhat similar to the microservice architecture. Just like in microservice architecture, the backend is distributed among different services, each of them being used for different tasks, in serverless architecture (especially in FaaS), the backend is divided into different tasks, and each of these tasks can be implemented as a separate and individual function. These functions are then served through an API over different endpoints and can be accessed by the frontend.

This is what a basic application built over serverless architecture would look like.

Function as a Service (FaaS)

FaaS is the most popular and newer implementation of serverless architecture. In this implementation, we create multiple functions to perform each task which is an independent part of the backend server logic or service.

Let us consider the case of AWS Lambda functions to understand this.

“AWS Lambda is a serverless, event-driven compute service that lets you run code for virtually any type of application or backend service without provisioning or managing servers.” ~ https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/

The lambda functions do not require you to manage their deployment or load balancing yourself, and rather the infrastructure of AWS manages that for you. These functions are deployed as containers on the server, where each server can have multiple function instances running on it depending upon the user traffic and computation power required by the functions.

These are very easy to build and AWS allows you to integrate many other services like DynamoDB ( AWS NoSQL Database ), S3 (Storage Service), SQS (Queuing System), SNS (Notification System), and so on.

Lambda functions are not only easy to build and deploy but they are also very cost effective since you are charged on the basis of computation time used by the function instances, which is only accounted for when the function is called. AWS even provides you with about 1 million free requests and 3.2 million seconds of compute time per month.

Use Cases and Limitations

Now let us have a look at some different cases where we can actually use the serverless functions and how it will be beneficial for us, or what can be some of the limitations.

Data Processing or Collection

Lambda functions can be great for the lightweight processing of data for an application since they generally do not take much compute time and it will be very easy to store the data using other services. You can create a very small function to just store the form data of a web application submitted by a user to DynamoDB (Database), and later use that data for self-analysis.

Backend Logic (CLient Heavy Application)

Since for the client-heavy applications, the backend is very lightweight and has high latency, the backend or server side logic is very easy to be implemented in the lambda functions and since you do not have to manage your deployment, it becomes somewhat similar to Backend as a Service (BaaS), which basically are platforms that provide you with backend without you requiring to manage it.

You will not need to know concepts like the CI/CD pipelines or other DevOps-related concepts to scale or deploy your logic.

The client heavy applications might include a personal blog, a designing application, or any other application where a good part of logic is implemented over frontend.

Limitations

When a lambda function is left idle for some time, they are required to go through a cold start which means it takes time to start and respond. So if a quick response is needed, and there can be an expected low traffic period, then lambda functions are not very suitable. Also when the applications have a heavy backend, which would require a lot of computation power, then we should ideally not use lambda functions, since they are not efficient in those use cases.

For example, you should not use Lambda functions for MLOps ( Deployment of ML Models ), since they can require very high computation and have high latency.

Conclusion

Serverless architecture is a great framework to be implemented in your applications. With its many advantages, it also has some limitations, and hence as a best practice, you should not depend solely on lambda functions for your backend, and instead develop a hybrid backend, with the lightweight functions getting implemented by the serverless functions. This will not only reduce loads of you for management of the server logic but also let you focus more on the main product or service that you intend to provide.

Now that you understand the basic function of serverless architectures, we can move on to understanding more details of cloud computing and architecture. We can explore other forms of architecture as well as understand how each of these cloud functionality works individually.

To support my articles, you can check out my official blog at Thinkfeed and subscribe to the newsletter over there so that you never miss a post and keep yourself updated. Enjoy Reading!

This article was originally published on https://thinkfeed.divyesshm.com/post/serverless-architecture

Basics of Web App Architecture

Divyessh Maheshwari — Mon, 18 Apr 2022 08:35:22 +0000

Have you ever wondered how the data flow takes place in all the web applications? or how the distributed systems works? or how the large applications with hundreds of services are managed individually?

In present days, even the minimal viable products or proofs of work can also have a combination of many different services and use several different integrations. Building a web application from scratch that includes all those services also comes with an important question of which architecture to use. First, let us understand how web applications work and how the client and server interact. During this journey, we are going to understand how we can build a basic application that has an authentication service, a storage service, a database, and a basic UI.

It is recommended to check out the “ backend development ” post and the “ application programming interface ” post in order to have better clarity of the concepts getting covered in the following post.

Introduction

Our app will be an image-sharing platform, where one person can only share a single image on their profile, and he can change that image at any time, and to view others' profiles or to edit their profile, they would also need to log in or signup to the application.

So the components of our application will include an authentication and authorization service which can log in the user, a database service where the user data like login credentials and the path of the image they upload can be stored, a storage service where the image itself uploaded by the user can be stored and of course a user interface for the user to do all that.

Now to do all that the most basic data flow can be shown in the image.

The UI requests the webserver for different services, and accordingly, the webserver queries the database or requests the storage and returns a response to the UI back.

Now let us learn what web app architectures are there and see how this data flow changes as we use different architectures.

Web App Architecture

Web application architecture is a blueprint of simultaneous interactions between components, databases, middleware systems, user interfaces, and servers in an application. It can also be described as the layout that logically defines the connection between the server and client-side for a better web experience. ~www.simform.com

Before mapping different methods of client-server interactions, let us also take a look at the general data flow through different layers in web architecture.

Data Flow through Layers of Web Architecture

There are 4 layers through which the data transfer generally takes place.

Presentation Layer: It consists of the frontend ( The UI Components ) of the application. It is generally built with HTML, CSS, and JS frameworks, and it enables the client to communicate with the interface.

Business Layer: It consists of the business logic, validations, and utilities of the application. It is responsible for routing, error handling, data handling, and other backend processes.

Data Access Layer: It works as an interface between the business logic and the database so that the business logic does not have direct access to the database. It handles and manages the data stored in the database and is responsible for all the CRUD requests.

Database Layer ( Data Service Layer ): It secures the data stored in the database by the user as well as the server by providing an additional option of protection for the data.

Different Web Architectures

We can divide the different architectures on the basis of their data flow patterns in frontend and backend respectively. We are not going to discuss all these architectures in complete detail right now, rather I am going to provide brief info about each of them, and we will discuss these architectures in detail in the dedicated future posts.

On the basis of different data flow patterns in the frontend, the websites, in general, can be classified into Legacy HTML apps ( Traditional ), Widget Web Apps, and Single Page Applications (SPA).

Legacy HTML Web Apps

These are the most traditional form of web architecture. In the applications using this architecture, the client or browser sends a request to the server, that consists of the web page construction logic, and receives a complete HTML page in response. To update the page, the user is required to reload the page which again sends a request to the server, and generates a new HTML response again from scratch.

This architecture is generally considered good for static web pages so that user does not need to reload again and again.

If we use this to build the frontend of our Image Sharing Application, then the data flow would look like this.

Widget Web Apps

In this type of web architecture, the client has different components called widgets, which receive data by sending queries to the web services and displaying the data without reloading the entire page. These are very complex to build but have certain advantages like being dynamic, mobile-friendly, and very responsive.

Single Page Applications

These are one of the most modern forms of architecture that are widely used throughout the industry for all purposes. We can build both dynamic as well as static programs in this architecture and both have very good efficiency.

In this type of architecture, only a single web page is downloaded at once and the JavaScript used in the page constantly communicates with the server.

Most of the modern and popular JavaScript and TypeScript frameworks like Vue, React, and Angular are used to build the SPAs.

On the basis of the backend server configuration and data transfer patterns, the web app architectures can be classified as Monolithic, Microservices, and Serverless.

Monolithic

This is again the most traditional architecture used. In the applications using this type of architecture, the complete backend business logic and database logic are combined into a single large codebase. These applications initially are easy to build and simple to test, but they are very hard to scale, since you can only scale them up vertically, and the flexibility and agility in the code are highly reduced.

Microservices

This is a more modern solution to the problems that were raised in a monolithic architecture. These applications have a distributed backend, where each service has its own separate codebase and have a great scope of scalability and agility. Also since one service is not affected by another, it increases the flexibility of the application to work on updates without compromising other services.

Serverless Architecture

“Serverless architecture is an approach to software design that allows developers to build and run services without having to manage the underlying infrastructure. Developers can write and deploy code, while a cloud provider provisions servers to run their applications, databases, and storage systems at any scale.” ~ www.datadoghq.com

This architecture is very highly scalable since all the services are created as separate entities as well as the number of instances of the entities can be modified as per the traffic.

For example, FaaS ( Function as a Service ) is one of the most popular examples of serverless architecture. So if we have to create a small data processing API, we would just need to create an AWS Lambda function, connect it with the API Gateway, and that's all. It will be deployed without any excessive costs or management required.

Following is an AWS-specific example.

Conclusion

Now that we have a basic understanding of what web app architectures are, and the different types we can use to build our application, we can study the specific architectures in detail. For instance, the future posts will consist of a detailed explanation of serverless architecture and some other topics which would require you to know these basics as prerequisites.

I hope you enjoyed reading the post. This was originally published at my official blog thinkfeed.divyesshm.com. Do visit there and check out the articles. I will be posting some of the posts exclusively on that site, so do follow up and subscribe to the newsletter.

Application Programming Interface

Divyessh Maheshwari — Thu, 27 Jan 2022 19:58:39 +0000

Have you ever wondered how can the frontend and the backend of an application communicate with each other? Or how do different apps extract data of other apps and websites like YouTube or Twitter?

All the applications that consist of a separate backend and frontend, have to use APIs ( Application Programming Interface ) to communicate with each other. The data transfer, logic processing, and other triggers take place through APIs only. If you want to know more about the backend of applications, you can check out this post by clicking here.

Today in this post, I am going to talk about APIs, and how they are used for different purposes and in different architectures. So let us begin.

Suppose you are a data scientist or a machine learning engineer, and you want to create a program to perform analysis over some youtube videos and channels, for example, you might want to predict the number of likes a video will get in a given time duration depending upon the number of subscribers of channel and data collected from previously posted videos. So in order to do that you will need a lot of data on the videos, as well as different channels.

Now in order to get so much data in bulk, you will be required to use the YouTube API, which will provide you a direct medium or bridge to all this data, and then you can simply extract it as per your use.

On the other hand, if you were not given access to this API, you would have done the same task manually or by creating a scrapper, and either of those methods would have been very inefficient and could have given trouble many times.

Types Of APIs

There are four different types of APIs depending upon their usage and accessibility. Let us study these in brief.

Open/Public APIs

These are APIs that can be accessed after getting a subscription or registration by developers. They have a low restriction and are generally used to access public data. Twitter API is one of the examples of public API since it enables users to get access to some public data which can then be used for different purposes such as educational projects, analysis, trends studies, etc.

Partner APIs

These are similar to Open APIs, although these are more restricted and are shared with limited partners after getting subscribed and approved by respective organizations.

Internal/Private APIs

These are not exposed publicly and are used internally among the system for different purposes like communication within the applications or system. They can also act as mediums for the frontend to communicate with the backend.

Composite APIs

These are generally a combination of multiple API endpoints and can be for the public as well as for internal use.

API Architectures

APIs also have a set of rules, structure, and format which defines their usage and operations. These are called its architectures or protocols. There are majorly three different protocols that we are going to discuss in this post.

Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)

“In distributed computing, a remote procedure call is when a computer program causes a procedure to execute in a different address space, which is coded as if it were a normal procedure call, without the programmer explicitly coding the details for the remote interaction. ~ Wikipedia”

These were one of the oldest API calls and are generally used less in present-day applications.

Simple Object Access Protocol/Service-oriented architecture (SOAP/SOA)

“SOAP is a messaging protocol specification for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services in computer networks. ~Wikipedia”

These were structured API protocols but were very rigid and complex, and hence are not used often by emerging systems, but still used in many legacy applications.

Representational State Transfer (REST)

This is presently the most widely used architecture for APIs. It is primarily used in microservice architectures. It is highly flexible, cacheable, fast, efficient, and stateless architecture.

“REST has been employed throughout the software industry and is a widely accepted set of guidelines for creating stateless, reliable web APIs. A web API that obeys the REST constraints is informally described as RESTful. RESTful web APIs are typically loosely based on HTTP methods to access resources via URL-encoded parameters and the use of JSON or XML to transmit data. ~Wikipedia”

So, now let us also understand what is JSON or XML.

Data Interchange Format

Data is transferred on the web in majorly two forms: JSON or XML. This can be data sent as request payload as well as response.

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

“JSON is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays. ~Wikipedia”

JSON is language independent and allows to sharing of key-value pairs, arrays, or objects during web calls. It is readable and accessible as JSON objects and doesn’t need any further. So for example, if I have created an API that takes 2 numbers as input, and returns their sum as output. Then following can be examples of input and output.

XML (Extensible Markup Language)

“Extensible Markup Language is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. ~Wikipedia”

XML data needs to be parsed before using and a similar example as above can be represented in XML as follows.

Conclusion

Now that we have a better understanding of APIs work, we can understand how these are created or implemented in different computer architectures. So to know more about the topic, just follow up with the post and stay tuned. I will keep adding different posts related to computer science concepts from a very fundamental point of view.

Cloud Computing

Divyessh Maheshwari — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 08:06:43 +0000

Have you ever wondered where are your emails stored? or how you can effortlessly switch mobiles and all your backed up data is transferred so smoothly? or what does it really mean by backed up data itself?

Even though you may not know it, but almost all of us are using the cloud in one way or another. If you have a Google or an Apple account, use Gmail, backup WhatsApp data, you are already on the cloud. Cloud Computing is such an essential part of our lives, that today without the cloud, we cannot make a search on Google, or shop on Amazon, or even use Skype.

Today, in this post, I am going to talk about cloud computing, and how is it being used by developers and engineers. So let us start.

“Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. ~ Wikipedia”

Cloud Providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure Cloud, and many others, provide many different resources and services such as storage, computing, database, etc to users on an as-needed based. For example, suppose you have a Google Account, then you will already be registered on the Google One platform, which provides you with 15 GB of free space. This space is consumed by the mails we receive, the images and videos we back up, the media stored in the drive, the app data of different apps we use, and many others. Google also provides a cloud identity service, which we use whenever we sign in on a platform with Google. And not only Google, but Microsoft (Yahoo), and many other cloud providers, also provide similar services.

I hope you can imagine the scope of services that are provided to us by the cloud. These services are not limited to just general purpose use, these are provided to companies and organizations that use the cloud for various purposes including computing, database, storage, analytics, security, identity, and so many others.

Photo by Ian Battaglia on Unsplash

Cloud Services in Industries

Today, cloud computing is being used in almost every enterprise of any scale in every industry. Especially, it has a lot of advantages to small enterprises since, its setup is very quick, easy, and cost-effective. Without cloud computing, if you want to create and host your website, you will need to purchase your own physical server, use its storage, create and manage a database, manage the loads, and do a lot more work. But using cloud services, depending on the type of industry and use case, we don’t need any physical setup. We just need to register on a cloud-providing platforms, such as AWS, GCP, or Azure, and purchase different services as our need, like storage, database, computing, etc. and deploy our application. That’s all you need to do.

Let us now have a look at how the cloud is being utilized in different industries.

Education

Educational Institutes have adopted many cloud solutions to provide various services to both, the students and faculty. They store their huge student and faculty records on the cloud for complete safety and security. They use cloud platforms in order to stream live videos, conduct virtual meetings, and even upload assignments. There has been significant growth in cloud usage since the COVID 19 because due to lockdowns, physical classes were no longer being conducted. Hence the migration to the cloud for most of the tasks became very essential.

Finance

Since, in finance industries, there are a lot of data that needs to be stored or processed, or analyzed. Storing so much data on one local server can be very risky since, in case it crashes, there will be a huge loss faced by the organization, and if backups are created, it will be very costly to manage them. Hence using the cloud in order to store these data, was a very beneficial option as it provides very high security to your data. Another part was implementing artificial intelligence in capital markets. These AI programs could need very specific server configurations to be optimized and needed to be secure and fast. So hosting these models on the cloud was another great advantage for the industry.

Distributors and Retail Stores

Most of the distributors or retailers already use the cloud as accounting software and stock management systems. There can be a possibility that they can use CRM(Customer relationship management) software or probably eCommerce platforms. Many suppliers have recently started implementing affiliate marketing to their products, and it can be very beneficial for them if they implement these systems overcloud.

Healthcare

The healthcare industry puts requires a lot of patient safety and privacy. Many cloud providers provide HIPAA compliance to ensure proper treatment of patient information. Diagnosis Systems are also popularly being implemented in cloud. These implement artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to make medical diagnoses and recommend treatments.

IT Industries

Obviously, there is a huge implementation of the cloud in IT industries, as it is the backbone of many enterprises. Most IT solutions are cloud-based, such as all modern SaaS(Software as a Service) implementations are cloud-based. The outbreak of serverless architecture is also becoming a popular cloud feature. There can be an endless list of cloud implementations in IT industry.

Cloud Providers

Now let us have a brief introduction of the three major cloud providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

Amazon Web Services

“ Amazon Web Services, Inc. ( AWS ) is a subsidiary of Amazon providing on-demand cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments, on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. These cloud computing web services provide a variety of basic abstract technical infrastructure and distributed computing building blocks and tools.~ Wikipedia”

AWS today has a market share in the cloud vendors of about 32% which is the highest among the vendors, and more than the combined market share of GCP and Azure.

It conducts many events throughout the year. You can view and attend these events over here.

Google Cloud

“ Google Cloud Platform ( GCP ), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside a set of management tools, it provides a series of modular cloud services including computing, data storage, data analytics and machine learning.~Wikipedia”

GCP has a market share of around 7% and has shown a growth rate of more than 45% in 2021. It also conducts a few events which you can view over here.

Microsoft Azure

“Microsoft Azure , often referred to as Azure, is a cloud computing service operated by Microsoft for application management via Microsoft-managed data centers. It provides software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and supports many different programming languages, tools, and frameworks, including both Microsoft-specific and third-party software and systems.~Wikipedia”

Azure has a market share of around 19% and has shown the highest growth rate of around 50% in the year 2021.

Azure conducts many events, conferences, and webinars. You can register or view them here.

Conclusion

Cloud is not a new conception, it has been active for a long time, although, it has been diversifying in a lot of industries and can be very beneficial for certain tasks. Like in case you want to experiment with starting your own website or SaaS, or maybe want to try to implement some IT solutions in your industry, it can be a great starting point.

To know more about the topic, just follow up with the post, and I will keep adding different posts related to computer science concepts, and try to keep them from a very fundamental point of view.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this post. If you would want me to create a post on any different topic, let me know in the comments section.

Backend Development — The Server Side?

Divyessh Maheshwari — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 18:32:52 +0000

Backend Development : The Server Side

Have you ever wondered how the big data websites work so fast? Or where is your user data stored on different social media sites? Or perhaps how the logic of the websites is created? In case you have ever wondered about any of these questions, you have landed on the right post.

Most of the applications, websites and even software, that you may be using effortlessly in your daily life, that lets you chat with your friends, create your school presentation, or even lets you use many different filters, have been built upon different architectures of computer science. They could have really complex structures for data processing, or they might just have a simple logic. But all of these sites have two ends — frontend (client-side) and backend (server-side).

The frontend or the client-side includes the interface that you work on and the experience that you have on the website, while the backend or the server-side consists of the logic layers, the databases and the APIs.

Today, in this post, I am going to talk about the backend development and help you understand what the database, APIs, or logic layers really are. So let us dig in.

So users do not generally, see the backend programming in action, but whenever you perform an action on the site that requires some data transaction, data storage or even need to run some logic or algorithms, the backend is playing the role. That action can be as simple as creating an account on social media, running a search on Google, or just an update of information like changing your password. Now we are going to have a look at different parts of backend one by one.

Database : The Store of the Data

Database is the place where all the data on the site is stored. It is place where your user information is stored, your purchase history on a site is stored, and maybe even your files or images are stored. It is a very important piece of Backend which requires the maximum security. It has varying structure depending on the use case.

For Example, let us see what kind of a database we will need if we want to create a social media site. So first of all, we will need to store the user information like name, email, mobile number etc. So we create a table named ‘user’, and start storing user info in there. Then we will also need to create a table to store all the images that would be uploaded on the site. But how do we link the image, and the user table, because we would want to see which image has been uploaded by which user. So we develop a relation between the tables. But images are not the only part, we will need to store the messages or chats between different users and also need to create a table for different groups.

Until now, you might have started to see how a database can be really complex even for some simple functionalities.

API : Application Programming Interface

APIs are the interface or the medium between the frontend and the database. It is the program that enables communication between user interface and the database by acting as a middleware.

Formally

“An application programming interface ( API ) is a connection between computers or between computer programs.”

“The term API is often used to refer to web APIs, which allow communication between computers that are joined by the internet.”

So for our purpose, let us understand the API as a messenger, that takes a message from the client-side (request) and delivers it to the server. In return, the server-side provides a message (response), which is then delivered to the client. These messages (requests and responses) consist of information like type of request/response, data, request method and a much more.

For example, when you signup on a website, the frontend sends a request to the server via API which contains your user data, and then the server identifies and executes that request, in this case adding you in the database. After performing the function, the server sends a response in return for the requests, which contains information like if the function was executed properly, the request was correct, etc.

Logic Layer : All the Data Processing

The logic layer is the most important part of backend since it actually contains different operations or functions that need to be performed. It consist of different validations, views, processing and all the other integrations.

To understand this, take an example like creating a second Instagram account using a previously email address or mobile number. When you try to do this, the application does not allow you to do that, and that is because before creating/adding user in the database, it first validates (checks) if the user already exist in that database. This validation takes place in the business layer. If you create a really nice program that takes in a word document and converts it into a PDF, and let us say that you want to convert your program into a publicly accessible web application, the you place the main logic of your program in the business/logic layer of the web application (backend).

Conclusion

Now that we have a basic understanding of different parts of backend, we can understand how this backend is created, deployed and optimised using different platforms and programming languages. So, to know more about the topic, just follow up with the post, and I will keep adding different posts related to computer science concepts, from a very fundamental point of view.

I hope that you enjoyed reading this post. If you would want me to create a post on any different topic, let me know in the comments section.