Posted on

23 Node.js Best Practices For Automation Testing

If you are in the world of software development, you must be aware of Node.js. From Amazon to LinkedIn, a plethora of major websites use Node.js. Powered by JavaScript, Node.js can run on a server, and a majority of devs use it for enterprise applications. As they consider it a very respectable language due to the power it provides them to work with. And if you follow Node.js best practices, you can increase your application performance on a vast scale.

When it comes to automation testing, it requires a very systematic approach to automate test cases and set them up for seamless execution of any application. This requires us to follow a set of defined best practices for better results. To help you do that, we will let you in on the best Node.js tips for automation testing.

Posted on

Observability and AIOps: The Perfect Combination for Dynamic Environments

IT teams live in dynamic environments and continuous integration/continuous delivery has been in high demand. In the dynamic environment, DevOps and underlying technologies such as containers and microservices, continue to grow more dynamic, and complex. Now, just like DevOps, observability has become a part of the software development life cycle.

With basic monitoring techniques, ITOps and DevOps teams lack the visibility to support the explosive growth in data volumes that arise in these modern environments. And, that’s also because they cannot scale with manual processes. Traditional monitoring systems focused on capturing, storing, and presenting data generated by underlying IT systems. Human operators were responsible for analyzing the resulting data sets and making necessary decisions, making the IT processes human-dependent.

Posted on

Better Incident Management While Working Remotely

With the onset of remote work due to COVID-19, remote incident management has become the norm for businesses worldwide. Organizations that were earlier used to having war rooms now find themselves having to coordinate teams through Slack, MS Teams, or other collaboration tools. This unexpected and unplanned transition has created a unique set of problems.

Now that we have had a few months of experience in dealing with incident management remotely, here are some best practices we found to be effective. While these best practices are already recommended for effective incident management; in times of remote working, we believe this list is a great starting point to stay on top and prevent major outages.

Posted on

How to Create a Sparse File

Sparse files are files with “holes”. File holes do not take up any physical space as the file system does not allocate any disk blocks for a hole until data is written into it. Reading a hole returns a null byte.

Virtual machine images are examples of spare files. For instance, when I create a VirtualBox machine and assign it a maximum storage of 100Gb, only the storage corresponding to the actual data in the machine is consumed.

Posted on

React vs. Vue in 2021: Best JavaScript Framework

While JavaScript frameworks are now vital for web app development, many companies struggle to choose between React and Vue for their projects. The short answer is that there is no clear winner in the general React.js vs. Vue.js debate. Each framework has its pros and cons and is useful for different applications. So, we’ve put together this convenient guide to popular frameworks, to help you better understand the use cases of Vue vs. React and determine which one will work best for your next project.

Vue.js vs. React — What Are They?

Both React and Vue are open source JavaScript frameworks that make it easier and faster for developers to build complex user interfaces. Before we get into the React vs. Vue comparison, we’ll give you a brief overview of each one.

Posted on

Rapidly Develop Java Microservices on Kubernetes With Telepresence

Many organizations adopt cloud native development practices with the dream of shipping features faster. Kubernetes has become the de facto container orchestration platform for building cloud native applications and although it provides great opportunities for development teams to move faster, the learning curve can be steep and the burden often falls on application developers who have to learn new processes and tools. 

Challenges of Developing Locally With Kubernetes

For larger enterprises, Kubernetes and cloud architectures present a critical challenge compared to monolithic legacy applications. As Kubernetes applications evolve into complex microservice architectures, the development environments also become more complex as every microservice adds additional dependencies. These services quickly start to need more resources than are available in your typical local development environment. 

Posted on

A Comprehensive Guide To Deploy Ruby Bot Live On Heroku

Software deployment is an important part of implementing your software application after its initial phase of development. On the other hand, a bot is a continuous running script that performs a given task or responds to any triggered action on the occurrence of a specified event. Developers use them to carry out redundant activities. Let us find out more about these computing aspects.

What Exactly is Software Deployment?

Software Deployment encompasses all the processes, steps, and activities that make software ready to deliver from developers to users. It is the process of rolling out customized software that conforms to its client's demands in an interconnected world. Software deployment enables updates, applications, modules, and patches that optimizes the performance of the software. One of the key advantages of deployment is that testing ensures a bug-free, error-free process, and after the maintenance, the software is produced with additional updates and functions. 

Posted on

Migrating Jenkins Freestyle Job to Multibranch Pipeline

Anyone who recently started working on Jenkins, or started within the past few years, would by default go with creating pipelines for their CI/CD workflow. There is a parallel world, people who have been using Jenkins from its inception, who didn't get on a foot race with new Jenkins features and stayed very loyal to 'Freestyle jobs.' Don't get me wrong, Freestyle job does the work, can be efficient and a simple solution if you have a 1-dimensional branching structure in your source control. In this post, I would discuss why switching to Multibranch Pipeline was needed for one of our enterprise customers and how it has made their life easy.

Freestyle vs. Pipeline Jobs

Freestyle jobs are suitable for simple CI/CD workflow accompanied by a simple branching strategy. If you have multiple stages in your CI/CD design, then it's not the right fit. That's where the Pipeline enters.

Posted on

jpackage Is Production-Ready in Java 16

If you shudder thinking about compilation for different platforms, I know the feeling. One of the Java promises, the WORA (Write Once, Run Anywhere) principle, while revolutionizing platform independence, it stopped short of one more step – to be able to deploy anywhere. Personally, I think that WORADA sounds awesome, but I guess before Docker it didn’t occur to people that eliminating “works on my machine” is as simple as shipping your machine.

So you wrote a class, you’ve built a jar file and then you needed the right JVM (or JDK) and all the right dependencies, organized in a very particular way in order to make it work. What are the chances this knowledge will be consistently transferred intact from the Dev silo to the Ops silo?

Posted on

Let’s Think Kafka Cluster Without Zookeeper With KIP-500

Right now, Apache Kafka utilizes Apache ZooKeeper to store its metadata. Information such as the partitions, configuration of topics, access control lists, etc. metadata stored in a ZooKeeper cluster. Managing a ZooKeeper cluster creates an additional burden on the infrastructure and the admins. With KIP-500, we are going to see a Kafka cluster without the ZooKeeper cluster where the metadata management will be done with Kafka itself.

Before KIP-500, our Kafka setup looks like depicted below. Here we have a 3 node ZooKeeper cluster and a 4 node Kafka cluster. This setup is a minimum for sustaining 1 Kafka broker failure. The orange Kafka node is a controller node.

Posted on

Setup and Configure Velero on AKS

What Is Velero?

Velero is an open source tool to safely back up and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes

Velero consists of:

Posted on

5 Things to Do NOW for Apple App Tracking Transparency API

In the past few weeks and months, there has been a lot of talk and controversy around Apple’s new Tracking Transparency API.

The IDFA

The discussions center around access to the Identifier for Advertisers or the IDFA. The IDFA is an ID that allows apps and APIs to identify uniquely a user across multiple apps and websites.

Posted on

7 Continuous Code Quality and Automated Code Review Tools

What Is Continuous Code Quality? 

The static code analysis can be used to expose the areas of code that can be improved in terms of quality, and even higher, we can integrate this static analysis into the development workflow, and thus, tackle the code quality issues in the early stages of the development even before they reach the production. It is basically adding an extra stage to the continuous integration process such that every time a new pull request is made to merge new code, the CI server (or a 3rd party service) will begin the code quality analysis, dropping the result in the pull request itself which is available for the committer and code reviewers.

What Are Automated Code Review Tools?

An automated code review tool totally automates the code review process so that a reviewer has to only focus on the code. These tools integrate with the development cycle to start the code review when the new code is not even merged into the main codebase. There are several tools that you can choose to seamlessly integrate into your workflow according to the compatibility with your technology stack.

Posted on

Time for Next-Gen Codecs to Dethrone JPEG

AVIF has been getting a lot of tech press, but Jon Sneyers is hot on JPEG XL (which makes sense as he’s the “chair of the JPEG XL ad hoc group in the JPEG Committee”). According to Jon’s comparison, JPEG XL comes out on top on everything, except low fidelity compression, and offers progressive rendering which none of the other next-gen codecs do. But WebP (not to be confused with the upcoming WebP2!) has something of a leg up now that it has support across all the major browsers.

There is a whole ecosystem around image formats that is way wider than websites, of course, and I’m sure that plays a big role in what ends up on websites. What format do you get when you make screenshots on your system? What does your digital camera export? What does your favorite design software export? Then, once people have images, does the website-making software you use support them? I think of how WordPress rejects SVG unless you force it; I just tried uploading an AVIF for this post and it won’t take that, either.

I also think of the UX of new formats, like when I have a .avif file on my desktop, my macOS computer doesn’t know what to make of it. It’s just a blank white document with no preview. The image ecosystem as a whole moves slower than the web. Inertia, as Jon puts it, is a good framing, but hopefully can be overcome:

Let’s just hope that the new codecs will win the battle, which is mostly one that’s against inertia and the “ease” of the status quo. Ultimately, unless JPEG remains a dominant force, regardless of which new codec will prevail, we’ll reap the benefits of stronger compression, higher image fidelity, and color accuracy, which translate to more captivating, faster-loading images.

I’d bet that image codecs evolve as long as displaying images on screens is a thing. There is no endgame. The blog post I’m linking to from Jon is on the Cloudinary blog, and I gotta give it to them: Cloudinary — and services like it — are a solution here. They provide a system where I don’t have to care about image formats all that much. I upload whatever I have (ideally: big and high-quality) and they can serve the best possible format, size, and quality for the situation. That job, to me, is just too damn hard to do manually, let alone stay on top of long-term.

I see JPEG 2000 is still hanging out, but whatever happened to JPEG XR? It wasn’t that long ago we talked about serving that, even with <source>. Was that just mostly an IE thing that died with IE?

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

The post Time for Next-Gen Codecs to Dethrone JPEG appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

You can support CSS-Tricks by being an MVP Supporter.

Posted on

Distributed Vs Replicated Cache

Introduction

Caching facilitates faster access to data that is repeatedly being asked for. The data might have to be fetched from a database or have to be accessed over a network call or have to be calculated by an expensive computation. We can avoid multiple calls for these repeated data-asks by storing the data closer to the application (generally, in memory or local disc). Of course, all of this comes at a cost. We need to consider the following factors when cache has to be implemented:

  1. Additional memory is needed for applications to cache the data.
  2. What if the cached data is updated? How do you invalidate the cache? (Needless to say, now that caching works well, when the data is cached it does not need to be changed often.)
  3. We need to have Eviction Policies (LRU, LFU etc.) in place to delete the entries when cache grows bigger.

Caching becomes more complicated when we think of distributed systems. Let us assume we have our application deployed in a 3-node cluster: