Microservice stands as a pillar for event-driven applications (EDAs), which empowers applications to take action or respond to events. In contrast to the request-response model, here, clients receive data automatically when an event occurs within the application. Microservice advocates for EDA as it is based on loose coupling between components, fostering flexibility and agility. 

In similar scenarios, one of our clients, a call center business owner, approached us with a specific challenge- they needed an application that could effectively monitor and enhance employee productivity. The plan involved using laptop cameras to take pictures at regular intervals during the workday. These images would then undergo sophisticated analysis to detect the duration spent or actively engaged with the computer,  instead of engaging in activities like phone usage or temporarily leaving their work. Our task was to transform this concept into a functional and user-friendly application.

The client needed to ensure that their employees gave full attention, and this was a challenging endeavor for us as this required a scalable application that was not only capable of performing intricate image analysis but also met crucial technical requirements as mentioned below:

Need for  Scalability, High Availability, Security, and Performance:

The application had to be designed to accommodate higher workloads. This means it should be able to handle increased demands without compromising performance or causing disruptions.

It also needed to be structured to ensure it remained accessible and operational around the clock, without any significant downtime.

Due to the sensitive nature of the data, the application needed to be incorporated with robust security measures. This included encryption, access controls, and other safeguards against unauthorized access or data breaches.

Cost Optimization in Cloud Infrastructure: 

Given the choice of AWS (Amazon Web Services) as our cloud provider, cost optimization was a key consideration. We aimed to build an efficient infrastructure that would not only meet our client’s needs but also be cost-effective.

Techment’s Targeted Approach:

Our client necessitated an application capable of handling substantial volumes of data from diverse devices with a robust security framework. Hence, the desired solution must be scalable, secure, cost-effective, and high-performance. To address these challenges, we decided to adopt a microservices architecture, leveraging serverless technologies offered by AWS.

Microservices for Agility and Efficiency

Microservices architecture involves breaking down an application into smaller, loosely coupled services, each responsible for specific functionalities. This method gives businesses increased flexibility and agility, enabling them to split out specific functions.

Scalability: In a microservices architecture, scaling becomes highly specific and accurate. This approach allows the ability to allocate resources to individual microservices. This level of flexibility ensures the optimal utilization of resources and cost-effectiveness.

High Availability: To provide continuous and uninterrupted services, we ensured high availability by distributing services across multiple instances.

Security: Microservices can be isolated, and security can be implemented at each microservice level.

Performance: Smaller, focused services often improve performance as they can be optimized individually.

Key Components of Applied Microservice for Agility & Efficiency

DNSSEC for Enhanced Security:

To ensure the workplace productivity monitoring application, implementing DNSSEC provided an additional assurance that communication between various microservices occurs securely. This was especially important when dealing with sensitive data from laptop cameras, as it helped to protect against potential DNS-related attacks or spoofing attempts. When microservices communicate with one another (e.g., for data retrieval or processing), it relies on DNS to locate the specified service’s endpoint. DNSSEC prevents malicious actors from redirecting or intercepting these requests, ensuring the communication remains secure and trusted. 

CloudFront and S3 for Web Hosting:

Amazon S3 Bucket was utilized to host our web layer using Amazon CloudFront to deliver, track, and manage the data. The S3 bucket was not accessible to the public internet; only the AWS CloudFront service could access it. We employed Cloud Functions with CloudFront for header security checks. A backup S3 bucket was also linked to CloudFront through a group origin policy, ensuring that data would be served from the backup bucket in case of primary bucket downtime.

AWS Fargate for Docker Container Hosting:

One of the primary requirements was to ensure the scalability of resources as we capture data from remote locations during a particular monitoring cycle. Utilizing AWS Fargate proved to be an ideal solution for dynamically allocating resources based on demand, optimizing both performance and cost, and managing the dynamic aspects of our deployments.

It allowed us to effortlessly manage sudden spikes in real-time workloads while allowing our developers to receive almost instant feedback on deployments, all without the hassle of managing infrastructure or facing downtime. The seamless integration with Fargate streamlined this process.

Decoupled Architecture for Flexibility

To enhance flexibility and maintainability, we designed our architecture with separate layers: web layer, web API layer, application layer, and database layer. This decoupled approach allowed us to update and scale each layer independently, reducing complexity.

Amazon Aurora for Database

Amazon Aurora, a relational database engine, ensures cost-effectiveness with the power, performance, and reliability to efficiently store and manage our application’s data. We chose this option because it scales automatically based on the load and reduces the cost when no activity exists. It automatically increases the database volume’s size by storage needs.

Serverless Image Storage and Analysis

Amazon Rekognition is a fully managed machine learning service connected to S3, which stores face recognition images. AWS Lambda enabled us to execute code responding to events, such as image uploads, while Amazon Rekognition provided powerful image analysis capabilities. S3 served as a secure and scalable storage solution for our image data. 

Lambda functions by analyzing data stored in S3 and gets triggered when Rekognition sends the task completion status, i.e., about detected faces, emotions, and activities in the images. We stored the images and the analysis results in S3 buckets. 

Angular and .NET Core for Application Development

For Application Development, we harnessed the power of Angular and .NET Core, two robust technologies. We seamlessly integrated Amazon API Gateway into our architecture to expose our web APIs. Leveraging the capabilities of .NET Core, we meticulously crafted a strong backend, focusing on building RESTful APIs that ensure efficient data communication. We turned to the versatile Angular framework, utilizing its components, services, and directives. 

Maximizing Scalability through Microservice: Containerization, Orchestration, and Continuous Deployment

Mastering the art of designing a scalable microservices architecture is paramount in achieving high-performance applications that meet the demands of today’s dynamic digital landscape. By prioritizing loose coupling, fault isolation, and efficient communication, developers can lay the foundation for systems that effortlessly adapt to growing user bases and evolving requirements. Embracing containerization, orchestration, and continuous deployment practices further enhances scalability, ensuring seamless expansion and resource optimization. Ultimately, the journey towards a high-performance microservices architecture is an investment that pays off in agility, resilience, and a competitive edge in the ever-evolving world of software development.

Unlock the full potential of your scalable and distributed applications with Techment Technology. Elevate your microservices infrastructure with us and enable your organization to construct robust, scalable, and high-performing microservices applications. Connect with our experts for more. 

About the Author: Amit Sharma, Solution Architect, role encompasses comprehensive system design, crafting high-level system architectures, architectural reviews, code assessments, and proactive risk management, fostering innovation and seamless technology adoption.

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Applications, whether enterprise or industrial, disrupt user experience when they evolve. For the developer community, there’s much more to explore, simplify end-to-end workflows, and improve productivity, for transforming the user experience. Let’s check the big hits from the Google I/O 2023 event for the developer community and how this will help them transform Android application development.

Accelerating User Experience: 7 Vital Android Development Trends to Embrace

AI, new features in Android Studio, Google’s UI toolkit, Android 14, and other advancements in the Android mobile development space have new ways to transform user experience and much more for the developer community to explore.

1. AI in Mobile Development with Studio Bot: Google, with its new ‘Studio Bot’, a conversational AI in Android Studio, will help developers generate  codes, fix errors, and be more productive.

The new AI, Studio Bot, has been incorporated into Android Studio Hedgehog, which is the canary build of Studio featuring experimental features. Studio Bot has now entered the competitive realm of AI-based code generation, joining other prominent competitors like GitHub’s Copilot, OpenAI’s Codex, and AWS’s Code Whisperer. This addition is aimed at assisting developers in generating code, unit tests, and fixing errors more efficiently.

Studio Bot is built on an LLM (Codey), based on PaLM-2. By seamlessly integrating this LLM into the Android Studio IDE, Studio Bot offers many functionalities, including one-click actions and direct links to relevant documentation.

What sets Studio Bot apart is its privacy feature. You no longer need to send your source code to Google to utilize Studio Bot; only the chat dialogue between the developer and Studio Bot is shared, ensuring a more secure and private coding experience.

2.Interconnected Health Experience Through Android Health: Tracking the health of health app users is directly related to the data that devices collect. These devices collect data like- heart rate, oxygen level, workouts, etc., so developers need to deliver robust health & fitness apps for these devices, which will simplify the data’s access control and bring a more holistic view of data for users and developers.

Health Connect is an on-device android platform that allows health & fitness apps to use the same on-device data and offers APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to help developers connect different Android apps for storing and sharing health data. The more devices/ platforms like, Fitbit, Samsung Health, Google Fit, etc., are involved, the more APIs Health Connect provides. With the latest update, there will be less fragmentation for developers as it will support 40+ data types and a single permission management framework to control user data permissions.

Health Services, an API surface for accessing sensor data on Wear OS devices, will allow developers to write code once and run it in all integrated applications.

3. UI for Varying Screen with ‘Jetpack Compose’: Jetpack Compose (a modern toolkit for building native UI) is updated with new tooling and library features that allow deep customization options and visually appealing effects. With updated tools in Compose, developers can now use UI project templates that use Compose and Material 3 by default, and with new updates in Material 3, more motion and interaction support can be added to many components. 

Jetpack compose is Kotlin exclusive, meaning it is  built around Kotlin, and cannot be used in another programming language like Java. Earlier developers had to work both in XML and Kotlin files, but now it’s not the case. With new features of Compose, it’s now done only in Kotlin, which has enhanced the development speed. Compose is also compatible with the existing Views present in Android. 

The interoperability API feature of Compose is in a soundstage as it allows the coexistence of Compose and View in the codebase and includes improvement in startup time, application size, and build time.

4. Flutter 3.10 & Dart 3.0: The release of the latest Flutter 3.10 includes many improvements & new additions like components and component themes, updated visuals, and more, for web, iOS, Mac, etc. 

In the latest update, Google announced advancements in its popular UI toolkit, Flutter 3.10, offering better designs and Mac/iOS enhancements for mobile, web, and desktop applications. Impeller has now become a primary production-ready rendering engine for iOS, Dart 3, x3 WEB Performance, and more with Flutter 3.10, which will improve the performance of animations & unpleasant visuals by harnessing the advanced capabilities of next-generation GPUs.

In its new update, Flutter 3.10 will support Dart 3, Support for SLSA Level 1, an Enhanced Version of Flutter for the Web, Enhanced DevTools, and Production-ready Impeller for iOS.

With the release of Flutter 3.10, users can now experience a significant performance boost on iOS applications as Impeller, the rendering runtime for Flutter, is enabled by default. By simply migrating to the latest version of Flutter, apps can take advantage of this enhancement, leading to improved performance and smoother user experiences.

In addition, web support in Flutter 3.10 has undergone optimization to reduce load times, making web applications built with Flutter more efficient and responsive. Moreover, Flutter 3.10 introduces a groundbreaking feature called “element embedding,” enabling seamless integration of Flutter content as if it were a CSS element. This breakthrough allows developers to effortlessly incorporate Flutter components within existing web pages or applications, opening up new possibilities for creating dynamic and engaging user interfaces.

With these advancements, Flutter continues to solidify its position as a versatile and high-performance framework, catering to both mobile and web development needs with unparalleled ease and efficiency.

In the latest version of Flutter, APIs can be directly called through dart bindings without needing an external plugin. 

Dart 3.0 has added features like reduced null time errors, smaller compiled outputs, and records, patterns & class modifiers. The new patterns updated in language are structured data with records, destructuring of data back into individual elements, & pattern matching, and all of these support modern programming with abstract data types.

In the new class modifier, powerful access control for APIs is given to authors, providing more control for large enterprise apps.

5. Android 14’s Updated Privacy & Security: In its second developer preview of Android 14, larger space has been given to additional enhancements in privacy, security, performance, developer productivity, and user customization. The Photo Picker, a browsable & searchable interface, has been updated by Google, where users can specify which images and videos on the device apps are permitted to access rather than allowing apps to access their entire media library.

This API level must be greater than 24 for Android 14 to adhere to the technical requirements and functionalities, which will improve the security & privacy of users.

6. Android’s New Credential Manager: With the new alpha release of the credential manager, the new Jetpack API will allow developers to simplify their user’s authentication journey. Google expanded support for passkeys (passwordless authentication across Android & Chrome). This new update will enable users to create passkeys & store them in Google Password Manager.

7. Privacy Sandbox Updates for Android: Privacy Sandbox is a set of tools that aims to create standards for how advertisements & digital ads track Android users’ information without compromising private data. This initiative aims to develop technologies to limit covert tracking & show more relevant ads & content. For a more private advertising solution, Google announced a beta version that provides APIs designed for enhanced privacy which doesn’t use identifiers to track activity across apps & websites. Hence, advertising IDs will be replaced by privacy-preserving APIs. 

In the latest Privacy Sandbox beta update, developers can use Attribution Reporting APIs that support debug keys, allowing developers to receive unaltered & privacy-enhanced reports from Attribution API.

The introduction of these new updates will elevate developers’ productivity by enabling them to effortlessly incorporate enhanced security measures, improved reliability, greater control, and a range of additional features that were previously challenging to implement. These updates aim to provide developers with a smoother and more feature-rich development experience.

The event provided a glimpse into an exciting future where AI, ML, and advanced technologies seamlessly integrate into our daily lives, enhancing our experiences and empowering us in ways we never thought possible.

To Wrap Up:

At Techment, a software development and data and product engineering company, we were thrilled to witness many opportunities to work in modern Android & iOS development. As a company that specializes in data engineering, we understand the significance of harnessing AI’s power. Our services align perfectly with the advancements showcased at the event, as we offer expertise in developing AI-powered applications with various forms and factors. 

Additionally, our mobile development services, encompassing native and cross-platform solutions, align with enhancing user experiences through advanced technologies. 

We offer expert services in developing AI-powered applications tailored to your needs. From native to cross-platform solutions, our mobile development expertise aligns seamlessly with enhancing user experiences through cutting-edge technologies. Contact us today and unlock the true potential of modern mobile development!

The post Google I/O 2023: What’s Ahead for Android Development? appeared first on Techment.

Application leaders are looking for cloud migration to help remove the obstacles and to modernize legacy applications or systems. The applications created before the cloud could not be refactored or re-platformed to perform effectively in cloud environments but were able to perform when hosted in the cloud (left as it is, in a cloud environment). This was not entirely “cloud-native”. This is where lift-and-shift became a choice.

Lift and shift is the migration process that moves legacy applications as-it-is from on-prem or local data centers to cloud infrastructure with least or no modification, and without changing application code. This uses IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) service through rehosting. Legacy applications that are “fully” optimized can only be migrated through lift and shift, else, this may be expensive and also legally impossible. Gartner’s report on IaaS says, the worldwide IaaS public cloud service market grew 41.4% in 2021, where Amazon retained the No.1 position.

Reasons for choosing lift and shift (rehosting) over other app modernization solutions are:

• Direct migration to the cloud may affect backup content where lift and shift will make more sense and the process is also simple to perform. 
• Organizations that want to retain their on-premise infrastructure, but want to leverage cloud use lift and shift to kick start the implementation of hybrid cloud deployment. 
• When migrating off-shelf applications as you cannot re-architect them.
• Need for more cost-effective and more scalable backup and recovery.
  

But before undertaking the lift and shift (rehosting) for application modernization or data centers, carefully assessing and testing for the compatibility of the destination cloud is critical. Checking its ability to access the data at a reasonable speed, low latency, and easy replication of data without errors, would make the lift and shift successful. 

Let’s check important considerations in the catalog of lift and shift for successful migration.

8 Steps of Lift and Shift Assessment & Planning

Rehosting or lift & shift treats the workload primarily as a collection of traditional infrastructure resources like servers, disks, and networks, using IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-Service) in the target cloud platform. But every organization has different considerations and so they must take into account these factors and define checklists to leverage the benefit:

1. Right Time for Application Migration to Cloud: A lift and shift strategy is adopted when it’s necessary to close the data center. However, some factors should be considered before going with this type of migration: 

• Carefully access the capital expenditure (CapEx) and ongoing operating expenditure (OpEx), such as power and bandwidth. 
• Evaluate whether your business needs greater flexibility and agility. 
• Determine whether your business needs to be scaled i.e., needs expansion and contraction capacity.

During high customer demands it’s better not to migrate. So choose the right time to migrate depending on the availability of human and capital resources. 

2. Type of Application to be Migrated: Not all applications need migration, some applications need complete refactoring. Also, the one which provides business benefits must only be rehosted, hence the application for which benefits outweigh burdens must be chosen for migration.

3. Consider Customer Experience (CX): Customers are highly embracing online services and mobile applications, and businesses need to keep track of technologies and trends that enhance their experience. Assessing whether or not the rehosting will provide a great experience is necessary. For instance, in some cases it accelerates service delivery, in other cases, it will increase the bandwidth of the service being provided. But in some cases, it may compromise customer data security.

In the long run, managing customer expectations and customer experience (CX) will define success. Neglecting customers’ responses can have drastic business implications.

4. Application Lifespan: Considering how long your application workload will run on cloud or how longer you will use the application is an important factor before it’s migration. In case the application has to retire before 12 months, then there is no use of migration. Hence, expected life of application & data should be considered.

5. Number of Access Required for Application & Data: One important requirement is consideration to the number and types of access required for application. An additional analysis is required to determine how to provide access to other APIs or data that are not included in code.

6. Backups of Files & Libraries: The application codes, libraries, binaries, and databases from existing systems, must be checked before migration. Later, the test of the restore process must be performed using some test environments before the final migration. The final step should take place when the application and data are set up in the cloud followed by delta back-up. 

7. Compliance Requirements: Migrating apps from on-prem or private cloud to the hybrid cloud must ensure compliance requirements and should meet during and after the migration. As cloud estate expands, they need better governance controls to maintain visibility. With this, more workloads or applications with compliance mandates will enter the cloud environment.

8. Automation Tools Provided by Cloud Provider: Organizations look for ways that streamline IT operations and application delivery due to modern workloads. Many cloud providers provide automation tools to organizations to help them automate the process of resource deployment and configuration. Examining those tools will determine the capability of your specific situation.

It’s important to be aware of the implications and benefits of cloud migration strategies before executing them. A successful lift & shift (rehosting) needs the planning of checklists. Identifying key milestones, test processes, and avoiding potential pitfalls will set your migration up for success.

Conclusion:

Multi-level Assessment is Required Before Migration & Modernization

Most migrations happen when organizations ensure minimum risk and speed up time of production, which is more suitable in case of lift and shift. It is easier to modernize applications in this migration process, and companies can leverage cloud services and optimization easily.

It’s best to view this journey in various phases, and this should be performed with a multi-level review with well-defined categories. These observations can also be a great learning experience for application modernization initiatives.

Techment technology has provided migration solutions to organizations and is still counting. Our team of expert engineers can deliver the cloud solution that your organization requires. To get more information, get our expert consultation.

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