Anticipated to shatter records and surpass an extraordinary USD 813 billion in revenues by 2027, the global software market is set to achieve unprecedented growth. This surge is propelled by the pivotal role software products play in enabling businesses to attain a competitive edge in the digital era. As organizations strive for excellence in their digital offerings, the imperative to elevate software quality has propelled technology assessments to new heights. In this blog, we will guide you through the forefront of the industry, unveiling the most prominent trends shaping the landscape of software testing.
Certainly, let's explore the future of software testing by delving into the first trend on the list:
The role of a developer isn’t limited to coding alone but encompasses laying the foundation for a brighter future. The last few years have made the dynamic and transformative nature of software development more evident, driven by rapid innovation, shifting societal needs, groundbreaking technological advancements, and whatnot! As far as this context goes, software becomes more than just a tool, but instead a pivotal force shaping our digital and physical worlds, constantly evolving to meet today's demands and tomorrow's visions.
The Emergence of Edge Computing
Thanks to the growing popularity of the Internet of Things, edge computing has come under the spotlight. This paradigm shift, moving data processing from centralized cloud infrastructures to the 'edge' of the network (closer to where data is generated), is redefining efficiency, security, and latency. For a software developer, this means a significant shift in focus towards creating solutions that leverage local computation to enhance real-time data processing capabilities, crucial for applications such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, etc.
Looking to transform the healthcare industry by building great software? Here’s a quick guide for you!
Among all the industries that have benefitted immensely from the emerging new technologies, healthcare stands right at the top. And software developers, thanks to their tools and extensive skillset required to drive a meaningful change, are at the forefront of this transformation.
As an open-source real-time data warehouse, Apache Doris provides a rich choice of indexes to speed up data scanning and filtering. Based on user involvement, they can be divided into built-in smart indexes and user-created indexes. The former is automatically generated by Apache Doris on data ingestion, such as ZoneMap index and prefix index, while the latter is the index users choose for various use cases, including inverted index and NGram BloomFilter index.
This post is a deep dive into the inverted index and NGram BloomFilter index, providing a hands-on guide to applying them for various queries.
Our first article revealed the technology aspects you may need to consider when adapting to the cloud. Now, it’s time to look at it from the processes and people’s perspectives.
Cloud Readiness Assessment From a Process Perspective
Cloud technology adoption will eventually affect your development and maintenance processes, so ensuring those are also cloud-friendly regarding automation, development methodology, and testing makes sense.
Couchbase's newest AI cloud service is GA on Jan 30! It is called Capella iQ. We did a private preview for it in September, and some of you were invited to try it out! Now, it is available to every Couchbase customer who would like to see firsthand how useful AI can be in a database environment and what a boost it can add to developer productivity!
Even if you are not an existing customer, you can create a free trial account and try it out!
With growth comes more compliance responsibilities. Larger user bases attract the risk of data breaches, with malicious actors paying more attention to companies that are on the rise. Regulatory frameworks like GDPR, Quebec Law 25, and the India Data Protection Act have compelled enterprises to prioritize their compliance strategies since the penalties for violating them are significant.
A platform that simplifies the landscape for non-legal users, automates tasks, and enables business agility is critical to a solid cyber and data privacy compliance posture.
WebAssembly (Wasm) has reshaped how I view web development and serverless computing. This blog shares my experience with Wasm, focusing on two key tools, Spin — a platform for hosting static websites with Wasm — and Fermyon Cloud, a Wasm-powered serverless environment, and discusses their impact on enterprise applications and Kubernetes (K8s) environments. I also outline the current benefits of these technologies and the improvements I hope to see in the future.
Getting Started With Wasm and Spin
My journey with Wasm began in 2021 with WasmDay NA, where I saw a talk from Red Badger and realized that Wasm is going to be a big thing. From there, I started trying to understand the technology and following its development as, at that time, I only knew Wasm for enhancing applications' web browser performance. What really piqued my interest was its potential in serverless computing and application development. The prospect of running applications at near-native speed, regardless of the programming language, was particularly compelling.
At WPBeginner, we used to use Sucuri for a long time as our website firewall, security, and CDN solution. We recently switched to another firewall and CDN service, Cloudflare.
At WPBeginner, we are transparent about the technologies we use behind the scenes. We have consistently shared that expertise and knowledge with our users for the last 14 years.
In that tradition, we’ll share why we switched from Sucuri to Cloudflare and what performance and security gains we achieved.
Note: This article is part of our WPBeginner Insider series, where we introduce you to the products we use at WPBeginner. We publish WPBeginner Insider every other Thursday.
Background Story
Before we talk about the switch, let’s briefly talk about Sucuri and Cloudflare and what services they provide to website owners.
They are both website security and performance services and offer DNS-level website firewalls and CDN solutions.
What is a website firewall?
A website firewall acts as a security checkpoint between your website and its traffic. It detects and blocks malicious requests like attackers, bots, malware, hackers, and more.
Now, some firewalls work on the server level. However, they are less efficient because the malicious requests may have already reached your server by the time they are blocked.
Sucuri and Cloudflare are both DNS-level firewalls. They re-route your website traffic through their servers and block them before they reach your site.
Normally, when a user visits your website, they send their request to your hosting server. It takes more time for users to see your website if they are in a different geographic location.
A CDN service solves this problem by sending static and cached data of your website to the user from a much closer server. This will make your website load faster for all your users.
About Sucuri and Cloudflare
At WPBeginner, we used to use Sucuri for a long time as our website firewall, security, and CDN solution.
Cloudflare is the industry leader in CDN and website security industry. Over the years, it has grown incredibly, and so has its technology stack, infrastructure, and expertise.
Recently, we moved from Sucuri to Cloudflare CDN, and here we’ll share the reasoning behind that decision.
Reasons Why We Switched from Sucuri to Cloudflare
At WPBeginner, we always recommend our users choose a solution that fits their needs.
We use the same principle in our business by investing in tools and services that fulfill our needs.
Over the last several years, WPBeginner’s needs outgrew Sucuri. Several reasons made us decide to finally switch over to Cloudflare.
Here, we’ll explain each one of them so that you can get a behind-the-scenes look at how we reached that decision.
1. Faster and Largest CDN Network
Cloudflare is one of the world’s largest CDN networks. With servers in 310 cities across 120+ countries, Cloudflare directly connects to over 13,000 networks, including every major ISP, cloud hosting provider, and enterprise service.
This means Cloudflare is the nearest server to users’ locations and often the fastest with the lowest latency.
In easier words, Cloudflare is like a fast lane to the internet.
At WPBeginner, our users are from all over the world. Switching to Cloudflare meant reduced latency, faster page loads, and great performance no matter where our users come from.
In comparison, Sucuri has a smaller CDN network with servers spread across strategic locations. It did help speed up website performance, but not as much as Cloudflare, which has more servers across the globe.
Being able to deliver our content to more people, faster, made Cloudflare the obvious choice.
2. Better Granular Firewall Rules
A website application firewall like Sucuri and Cloudflare automatically detects and blocks malicious attacks at the DNS level.
Larger websites are more frequently targeted by hackers with malicious intent.
Those attacks are sometimes more sophisticated than common DDoS / brute-force attacks.
Because of that, we needed more control over the firewall and attack-blocking rules to combat this.
We are now on the Cloudflare Enterprise plan and have ‘Layer-3 Network DDoS Protection.’ We have access to many pre-made rulesets like Cloudflare WordPress, CF PHP, and more at this level.
We now have extensive options and granular control over what firewall rules we use, which helps us protect and block even larger and more sophisticated attacks before they can reach our servers.
3. Centralized DNS Management
DNS (Domain Name System) is crucial for translating human-readable domain names into IP addresses that computers understand.
Normally, the web hosting company or domain registrar handles DNS management for websites.
If a website is hosted in New York, and a user types in the domain from Tokyo, the request will take longer to resolve due to the distance between the DNS servers.
It is a negligible performance sacrifice for smaller websites. However, slow DNS resolution is a noticeable performance issue for larger and more popular websites like WPBeginner.
Previously, we used Sucuri with Constellix to improve performance. Constellix is a DNS server company with servers across the globe to ensure faster resolution of DNS regardless of the user’s geographic location.
Switching to Cloudflare gave us centralized DNS control and the ability to control DNS permissions better.
It also gives us a performance bump due to Cloudflare’s larger DNS server network, routing rules, and short TTLs.
This means when someone types in WPBeginner.com in their browser, the DNS resolution takes place much quicker because the response is closer to their location.
4. Uptime Reliability
This is a pretty major reason that we switched from Sucuri to Cloudflare. We noticed that occasionally, Sucuri would have regional outages, especially in Europe.
This would require our DevOps team to route European traffic away from Sucuri and direct it to our servers, which isn’t ideal from either a security or performance standpoint.
Imagine an outage occurring simultaneously when our website is under a DDoS attack. This could potentially degrade our website performance for users in other regions as well.
Cloudflare is more reliable in this regard.
They have a larger network, more data centers, and regional connectivity, all of which add more redundancy to their infrastructure, ensuring uptime.
This uptime reliability is crucial for performance and a big relief for our DevOps team.
5. Better DNS Analytics
Monitoring our website traffic using Google Analytics helps us make data-driven decisions about our business.
However, this data does not include information about DNS requests and their resolutions because website analytics tracking begins after the DNS resolution.
Access to DNS analytics helps us understand DNS requests and queries to our DNS servers. We can also see which requests were blocked, where they originated, and more.
Sucuri simply didn’t provide much of this information. Cloudflare has a handy DNS Analytics dashboard. They also offer an API to the Enterprise users to fetch data from their DNS logs.
Like the granular control of rules, being able to pull DNS logs and monitor requests and queries helps provide the best service we can to WPBeginner users.
Sucuri vs. Cloudflare – Which Do We Recommend?
Both Sucuri and Cloudflare are great solutions for the security and performance of a WordPress website. We would not have used Sucuri for as long as we did, if it weren’t a solid service.
You can take a look at our detailed comparison of Sucuri vs. Cloudflare for more information.
Which one do we recommend? It depends on your business needs and requirements.
For instance, if you are starting a blog or small business website, Cloudflare free CDN would be a great starting point.
It gives you access to basic website security and CDN network. Even at the free level, this improves your website performance and security.
On the other hand, if you can spend a little or have a limited budget, we will recommend the Sucuri website firewall. They are cheaper than Cloudflare’s more expensive plans and still offer a robust security solution to WordPress users.
Lastly, if your business can support it, we recommend upgrading to a Cloudflare Business or Enterprise plan. It will give your website a significant performance boost with enterprise-grade security and reliability.
We hope this article helped you learn the process behind our decision to switch to Cloudflare. You may also want to see our WPBeginner Insider case study of why we switched from Mailchimp to Drip for email marketing.
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The Azure Solutions Architect Associate certification is a highly regarded credential for Microsoft Azure professionals. Microsoft Azure is a premier cloud platform that offers a diverse set of cloud services. The Azure applications Architect Associate certification validates your knowledge in designing Azure-based applications. We’ll walk you through the certification test in this post, including advice, resources, and a study plan to help you succeed.
Understanding the Azure Solutions Architect Associate Exam
Before we dive into the preparation process, it’s essential to understand the Azure Solutions Architect Associate exam format and content. The certification exam assesses your knowledge and practical skills in the following areas:
