You can create a Spotify-similar streaming application, and this essay will help you to do it most efficiently. Here, we’ve gathered all the essentials you should know to develop a qualitative streaming solution that will be delightful for users, profitable and satisfying for your business needs.

What is Spotify? The Essentials to Consider

Before you start developing a streaming solution like Spotify, you need to find out what this service is, its operating peculiarities, and other crucial information. So, let’s start discovering. 

Spotify is a digital service for streaming music. It allows millions of customers to listen to favorite tracks and podcasts or look through video clips of well-known singers. Spotify can function in view of a website or a mobile app, depending on the user’s choice. This service utilizing is free of charge; however, some premium functionality enhances the user experience and can be obtained by paying for Spotify Premium. 

What do users get with a Spotify Premium subscription? These are the following commodities as:

• Offline listening
• Switching tracks without any advertisements
• Enhanced quality of the audio played
• Opportunity to use the subscription together with five friends, etc.

Spotify website’s view

Now, we’ll look at how this audio-streaming giant functions. You can start working with Spotify in two ways:

• Register your user account on the Spotify website (or download a free app from a marketplace). The social login through Facebook is also available, giving you an opportunity to find your Facebook friends, follow them and look at what track they like.
• Choose a kind of subscription (Spotify Premium, for example). This selection will help you connect with more devices and make your Spotify use more flexible and advanced. 

Spotify offers music for listening quickly and without any delays. How does it happen? A peer-to-peer (P2P) network streamlines the process turning the server users into microservers for the data exchange. This way, when you start playing a chosen song or a podcast, Spotify doesn’t apply the required data to a server, but retrieves it fragmentally from various users’ devices. Such a process can be performed even if people are offline. 

All the content on Spotify is played legally. It means the service owners got the license — the permission to publicly perform the audio tracks (or even video clips) for their customers. Planning the Spotify-like app creation you should care about this question. 

What organization should you apply to for having audio license? It depends on where your target audience is located: thus, if you’re aimed at European listeners, you can talk to European Stage Authors and composers. In case you plan to render your services to American market, The Broadcast  Music Incorporated is the organization you need to ask for licensing.

It should also be mentioned that Spotify watches your listening habits. It means if you save the first track of Celine Dion to your album, the system automatically prepares the next one. Spotify’s smart engine for quick audio streaming allows you to switch your favorite music without delays and even change the typical order of playing tracks. 

Developing an App Like Spotify: Where to Start?

Spotify became a go-to service for millions of music listeners around the world. According to a Forbes article, Spotify remains the biggest streaming server in the world at the beginning of 2022. Its revenue is more than $3 billion, as Macrotrends proves in their report. 

It’s not surprising that the entrepreneurs want to replicate Spotify’s commercial success and create a solution similar to it. Let’s find out what is required to build a Spotify-like streaming service. 

Choose a software development team to work with

Creating a solution like Spotify is a complex process, so you need to choose a team of qualified specialists in order to develop a top-class software. There are two effective hiring options you can choose from:

In-house team. You will be able to find and gather the local software experts under the roof of your office. Knowing how to create an audio and video streaming website (or application), they will build and deliver a qualitative digital product for your business purposes. However, you can choose this recruiting option if you have enough experience, time and money to look for local specialists, check their skills and employ them.

Collaboration with an outsourcing software development vendor. This option will be perfect for your business if you need to quickly find a sufficient way to create an audio streaming app with advantageous quality to price ratio. All you need is to choose a software development provider to collaborate with and start contacting them. 

How audio streaming app is created in outsourcing company: the typical development stages

After you’ve contacted an outsourcing software development vendor, told them the details of your project, and signed necessary documents for the upcoming collaboration, your software will pass the stages described below. 

The discovery stage is a start point for your streaming product to be properly prepared. This is the time for the specialists to enhance the quality of the product and make a detailed project specification defining functionality the app should contain, the third-party services to include, and other. Moreover, the composition of a future team to work on your project is decided on this stage. 

At this time, the UI/UX designers also start creating the upcoming app interface. This process begins from building a design concept, as well as the User Experience (UX) map. You can also offer them your own design sketches, if you have some. It should also be considered that the future streaming app design is tested for several times by the QA engineers who ensure that it’s easy to navigate and customer-friendly to offer you a flawless user experience.

After the designers finish the interface creation, the developers can start bringing the streaming solution’s functionality into life. Let’s talk below about how it happens. 

Spotify’s screen for new account registration as an example for your streaming app design

Product development and Quality Assurance. The software development engineers now need to implement the pre-defined list of features for your streaming solution by encoding them. All the process is controlled by a Project Manager (PM) and divided into sprints. These are short time periods (about 2-3 weeks) which purpose is to create a specific part of functionality or a full-fledged software.

QA team works together with the developers checking the developed functionality for bugs. In case the bugs are found, QA engineers make bug reports for the developers to deal with hotfixes. One of the QA team task is also to concentrate on the possible scenarios of the non-standard user behavior and eliminate the issues that can arise.

Software release means the streaming solution is published in the marketplaces (if it is a mobile app), or moved to a live server (if it’s a website). It is done after numerous tests from QA. 

After-development activities. The collaboration with an outsourcing IT provider is not ended after your audio streaming app is developed and released. The provider’s specialists continue to check the created solution for bugs, and add new features to it according to the early users’ feedback.

Thus, you can see that the outsourcing vendor will be your reliable assistant in solving the question of how to create an app for your business. They can carefully guide you through the development flow avoiding pitfalls (you’ll be able to fully participate the process) and delivering you a stable, effective and attractive Spotify-like solution. 

How Much the Spotify-Like App Development Costs?

The development price of a Spotify-similar solution is also one of the essential for the entrepreneurs. It ranges from $70,000 to $105,000, and the price growth depends on different factors. Some of them are the following:

• App operating system choice (e.g., iOS or Android)
• Solution’s security issues
• The size of the software
• Tech stack to be used during the project
• The UI/UX design
• The core and the advanced app features, etc.

Core features to be included in your audio streaming app functionality list

Cooperating with an outsourcing software development vendor, you can also have rough and detailed cost estimates prepared by experts. These estimates will help you wisely and effectively plan your expenditures. Moreover, you’ll always be able to apply to vendor’s specialists for consultation and advice, as well as promptly obtain it. 

Summing Up

As you can see, the creation of a music streaming solution like Spotify is a complex process, requiring a lot of knowledge, resources, and time. However, the skilled outsourcing software development company can assist you in such a development. The vendor’s professionals will be your trustworthy helpers in building of a streaming solution, which will fully fit your company needs, and attract new users for further business development.

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What is the metaverse?

The term “metaverse” was first used in a paper that was published in 1991 by a group of scientists interested in virtual reality. They used the term as a shorthand for “Metagraphics,” which means “to be beyond graphics.” In this paper, the authors describe the metaverse as a “global artificial reality” that exists as “a consensual hallucination,” created by the convergence of computer networks and the human imagination. Since then, the term has become increasingly common, and the concept behind it has evolved. Today, the metaverse is generally understood to be an expansive, interconnected virtual world that exists outside of traditional physical boundaries. It is a place where people can interact, create, and explore without limits, where the boundaries of reality and fantasy can be blurred. The metaverse is primarily digital; it exists in a virtual space, separate from the physical world we inhabit. The virtual world allows user interactions, creations, and experiences that would not be possible in the real world. It is a space where the rules of reality do not apply, where imagination and creativity can be explored and shared in new ways.

Benefits of the metaverse

The benefits of the metaverse are vast, and there is potential for the technology to have a transformative impact on our world. The benefits include: – Increased connectivity – The metaverse can foster an environment of increased connectivity, enabling people to connect and collaborate regardless of physical distance. This could have potential applications in the business world, where virtual meetings could replace costly and time-consuming travel. – Enhanced creativity – The virtual nature of the metaverse provides a space where imagination can be explored freely, enabling a heightened sense of creativity. This can lead to the creation of new and unexpected art and ideas that might not be possible in the real world. – Enhanced problem-solving skills – Virtual simulations can be used to train in a risk-free environment, with the opportunity to learn from mistakes and make adjustments as needed. This can be applied to a wide range of fields, including military training, health care, and engineering. – Social benefits – Virtual spaces can allow individuals to explore identities and connect with others who might not be able to do so in the physical world. This has the potential to reduce social isolation, provide a safe environment for experimentation, and create a more inclusive online space.

Potential applications of the metaverse

As a result of the benefits of the metaverse, there are a number of potential applications that have been discussed in recent years. While some of these potential uses are more likely than others, the virtual reality technology is only just beginning to emerge. With time, we will likely see the metaverse applied in new and innovative ways. – Collaborative design – Architecture, construction, and engineering firms could use the metaverse to collaborate on design projects, enabling teams to work together regardless of location. This could potentially result in more sustainable buildings, as well as reduced costs. – Education – The metaverse could be used in education to enhance the learning process, helping to boost creativity and problem-solving skills. This could apply to a wide range of subjects, including the arts, sciences, and humanities. – Health care – The health care industry could use the metaverse to create immersive training environments that allow trainees to practice with virtual patients. This has the potential to reduce the risk of mistakes and improve patient outcomes. – Immersive journalism – Journalists could create a virtual environment to re-create events or places in a way that is both engaging and factually accurate. This could be applied to a wide range of topics, including political events, natural disasters, and historical moments.

Social implications of the metaverse

The social implications of the metaverse are vast, and they are potentially both positive and negative. The potential of the metaverse to foster creativity, collaboration, and increased connectivity is great. However, there is also potential for misuse of the technology, and for it to create a more fragmented society. – Potential for increased isolation – While the ability to connect with others in the metaverse can be empowering, it also has the potential to foster isolation. This can be particularly dangerous for individuals with mental health issues, who may find virtual communication easier than real-life interactions. – Exploring darker sides of human nature – The virtual reality technology and the ability to create new identities in the metaverse has the potential to allow users to explore darker sides of human nature, including violent fantasies and sexual desires. This has the potential to create a more toxic social environment, where hate speech and bullying could be more common. – Privacy implications – As the metaverse becomes more popular, it could have implications for privacy, as more and more of our data will be stored in the virtual space. This data can be used for a variety of purposes, and it is important to be aware of the ways in which it might be used.

How the metaverse can shape the future

The virtual reality technology has the potential to shape the future in significant ways. With the development of advanced VR technology, we could see the creation of a completely immersive virtual world, where the boundaries between reality and imagination are blurred. This could have a transformative effect on our culture, enabling us to explore new ideas, create new art forms, and experience new ways of being. The technology also has the potential to transform how we live and work, enabling new kinds of interactions and collaborations, and reducing travel costs in the process. It also has the potential to transform education, helping to engage young people and build skills needed for the future. The virtual reality technology has the potential to shape the future by providing new ways to interact, new ways to collaborate, and new ways to experience the world. It may also enable us to explore new ideas and create new art forms. It could transform how we live and work, and transform education, as well.

Challenges the metaverse presents

As with any emerging technology, there are also potential challenges associated with the virtual reality technology. Some of these challenges include: – Privacy concerns – As the virtual reality technology becomes more widespread, there is potential for issues related to privacy, including data breaches and breaches of privacy. This can affect not only individuals, but also organizations that collect user data. – Health and safety concerns – As with any technology, there are concerns related to health and safety. Virtual reality technology has the potential to negatively impact human health, and is not recommended for children under 13 years old. – Lack of social interaction – The virtual reality technology has the potential to reduce social interaction, resulting in a more fragmented society. This can create both positive and negative effects, depending on the circumstances. – Lack of realism – Virtual reality technology can also have the potential to lack realism. This can result in a flattened, unengaging experience that does not foster creativity.

Conclusion

The metaverse is an expansive, interconnected virtual world that exists outside of physical reality. It has the potential to foster creativity, enhance collaboration, and foster connectivity, while also allowing us to explore darker sides of our identities. The technology also presents challenges, including privacy concerns, health and safety concerns, a lack of social interaction, and a lack of realism. As the technology develops, it will be important to consider how it can shape our future and what implications it may have for society.

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In this article, we are not gonna tell you how to get a smuggled clone of the app. Instead, let’s discuss WhatsApp through the perspective of a baseline or a skeleton you can use to create your own application featuring unique solutions but with the same mission in mind. 

Thus, the peculiarities of the WhatsApp tech stack, along with the time and cost of the development of its main features, are our main focus today. Ready to dive in? Hands app!

WhatsApp: a Short Story of One Popularity 

WhatsApp was created in 2009 by two friends and past Yahoo employees who quit their jobs in one day, Jan Kraum and Brian Acton. As it often happens, the primary incentive behind the app’s creation originated with the gap in another technology. Namely, it was Kraum’s dissatisfaction with the iPhone that inspired him to establish WhatsApp Inc. The company offered an app software allowing users to set statuses of their availability for a call, which was revolutionary at the time. 

Nevertheless, WhatsApp did not become an overnight success. For a couple of months, it actually seemed to be a failure. Luckily, it was not long before the game changer came:  iOS released its push notifications, and the number of WhatsApp users grew exponentially. 

Today, out of all apps that cater to a simpler and faster method of communication, WhatsApp has the largest audience amounting to two billion users (to compare, Facebook uses 1.3 billion people). WhatsApp popularity recipe narrows down to such main ingredients as user data privacy and security, quick and fail-safety user–to-user and multiuser communication, along with non-advertisement policy and absence of subscription fees.

Tech Backstage 

Let’s take a quick look behind the curtains of WhatsApp’s smooth performance ensured by dedicated development team services to see how it works from the technical side.

• Platform. In the beginning, WhatsApp was developed on iOS and consequently could only work on iPhone and its fellow devices. But things quickly changed when after a year of presence on the market, WhatsApp gained its first million users. In 2010, the app became a cross platform and can now be equally reached on BlackBerry, Android, or iPhone. 
• Programming language. The language in which WhatsApp is written is somewhat special. Erlang, the programming language, was created at the end of the 80s by the engineers of Ericsson, a large telephone airline provider. Erlang’s mission was to effectively manage a real-time system consisting of concurrent processes requiring fail-safety and fault tolerance: telephone switches at the time. Times have changed, but Erglang’s aptitude has not. It is currently leveraged by many popular messengers, including WhatsApp. 
• Messaging protocol. Every app with a chatting feature implemented needs a protocol under which the communication happens. For example, WhatsApp uses Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, enabling flawless data exchange between the app’s server and users’ end devices. XMPP not only ensures instant user access to messages but also informs the server about the user status.  

• Privacy measures. WhatsApp is famous for standing on the guard of user privacy. End-to-end encryption is the main weapon to mention in this fight. In a nutshell, end-to-end encryption implies that data gets encrypted while traveling through the app’s system and is only kept on the server before the end user confirms its reception. 

Development Spends 

Now to calculate the cost of WhatsApp development, it’s simply needed to multiply the rate of the development team by the number of hours needed for the feature development. For example, an iOS development company from Central Europe charges approximately $50 per hour, and our calculations are based on this rate. Additionally, development time depends on a platform you choose. For example, on the iOS platform, WhatsApp-like app’s development time, taking into account basic features only, would take about 620 hours, while the total development cost for one platform will be $30,000.

Average development time for iOS, Android, and back-end.

Basic Features 

Now that we know the approximate time and cost of WhatsApp’s development, let’s break down these numbers into smaller particles and allocate them to the app’s features. 

WhatsApp registration process. 

Messages exchange. WhatsApp ensures instant user-to-user and group chatting.

Development time: 210 hours.

Notifications. WhatsApp uses push and pop-up messages, which means that users receive information related to their communication in the app. 

Development time: 12 hours.

File delivery. Thanks to this feature, users can send voice messages, videos, and pictures via WhatsApp. 

Development time: 45 hours.

Contact sharing. The feature allows users to exchange contacts and save them in the contact book.

Development time: 68 hours.

Voice call. Online call is a cheaper equivalent of phone connection, which allows users to reach each other regardless of their location.

Development time: 200 hours.

Registration. WhatsApp doesn’t lead its users through traditional login and password procedures to register. Instead, only a phone number is used. All numbers in the user’s contact list are checked automatically by the app’s software. It then collates that data with the WhatsApp user base to list contacts in the app.

Development time: 55 hours. 

Apart from the above mentioned basic set of features, many other features can be implemented via a messaging app development to make it more user-friendly, such as adding stickers to the chat settings or enabling users to track the history of their actions. Of course, expansion of the feature list means a corresponding increase of time and investment spent on the development. Still, going the extra mile is always justifiable when it comes to tailoring an app so that it meets the requirement of uniqueness and stands out among competitors. 

Thus, we’ve run a quick review of nowadays’ most popular messenger, its technical peculiarities, and what it would take to create such an app in terms of time and cost. WhatsApp is a perfect example to take point by point, get inspired, and use a baseline for your own success story.

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Without doubt, customer loyalty is a result of the real value of your product proved upon its use, but gaining initial, ground-zero trust of your target audience is the task of UX design. In practice, this means that designers leverage various elements of UX design to provide users with a smooth and clear experience while using the web product. In this article, we’ll talk about the importance of the first impression when facing a website, and how to ensure it inspires trust with the help of properly approached UX elements.  

First Impression O’clock  

Although websites are inhabitants of virtual dimensions, the law of first impression covers them equally to the creatures of flesh and blood. If UX design fails to prove your website can offer a meaningful user experience within the first seconds of this meaning, nothing will shred this first estimation.  

As almost any other thing in this world, the first impression also faces the necessity to meet the deadline. For instance, that’s how much time it takes for users to assess attractiveness of some of the UX elements of your website: 

• Navigation menu – 6,44 sec.

• Search line – 6 sec.

• Footer – 5,25 sec.
• Logo – 6.48 sec.
• Content – 5.59 sec.

Each UX design component has its “expiration date”, i.e. the minimal guaranteed time span of keeping a user’s attention fresh and undemanding. To win user’s attention at this first impression’s phase and consequently ensure solid customer retention rate, special techniques are used.

What makes great UX design: best techniques and approaches 

Here it is worth clarifying that UX design is a wide notion that covers all kinds of elements required for ensuring smooth user experience, including many of those traditionally associated with UI design. The mission of UX design spans a vast arrow of processes covering product’s integration at all its phases. Thus, UX techniques really consist of user experience design (UX), user interface design (UI), and usability. 

• User research. Cohesive research of the target audience is the ground zero of every UX strategy, especially the one seeking to inspire trust to the product. Understanding of your user’s mindset is critical for choosing a proper approach in providing them with a sense of reliability while exploring your website.   

• Information Architecture. Information architecture deals with bricks just like the classical one but instead of clay UX bricks are made of data. Implementing solutions based on information architecture means arrangement of various pieces of website’s content in the order squarely fitting users’ habits and preferences. Unless your website content is located in a clear way, whispers of users’ desire to proceed on their customer journey barrel toward their swift end. 
• Interactivity. Static pensive design creates a pattern where users poise before every action implied by the purchase funnel.  In contrast, interactive UX design keeps the user in constant active mode as it ensures transparency of website navigation. Besides, interactive design serves the high purpose of personalized approach towards perceiving the website’s aesthetics and functionality during customer journey. 

• Testimonials. Feedback officially rules the stage of most effective tools in web-space decision-making. For entrepreneurs it is a way to know how their digital product is actually used by users who are already familiar with it, and for those who are not, it is a key reasoning point in deciding whether to do so.   
• Flexibility. Reliability of UX design is also determined by its ability to function equally across multiple platforms. That is all the elements of UX design content should look and act organically regardless of whether users reach it via an app, a tablet, or a PC. Additionally, design’s flexibility is determined by many other factors, for example, a wide range of payment options.  

An example of Information Architecture in Uber 

Ways to Analyze Website Usability

Okay, now that we have already discussed how to approach UX design in a way granting positive user experience. But how do you know that implementation of such solutions actually brings desirable outcomes? There are two primary types of methods you can use to measure and assess your website’s productivity in terms of UX design — quantitative and qualitative. 

Quantitative methods are helpful in analyzing click-through rates, tracking conversion rates, and more. As a result, you can understand user behavior better.

Qualitative methods serve the purpose of estimating customers’ ability to navigate the UI comfortably and their ability to successfully complete tasks during this process.

Of course, it’s better to use quantitative and qualitative methods combined. Additionally, there are certain metrics that are used to analyze customers’ behavior. Specifically, it is crucial to monitor how fast customers leave your website and how many of them want to continue the cooperation. 

There are a whole bunch of tools out there that can help you analyze the relevant data to gain accurate statistics. Most popular of such tools are Google Analytics and Open Web Analytics. 

• Google Analytics. The biggest reason why so many website owners apply to Google Analytics is its broad functional set. For example, the service offers real-time statistics and the ability to monitor traffic sources. 
• Open Web Analytics. Companies use Open Web Analytics as a content analysis tool. It has no limits concerning data storage and the number of websites that are accessible for measurement. OWA is capable of measuring unique visitors, page views, referral websites, and user location.

Besides, as was mentioned earlier, excellent UX design covers all devices from which a website can be opened. To this end, every UX design should correspond to the requirement of adaptivity.

Well-considered UX design is crucial for building trusting relationships with your customers. Integration of innovative UX techniques within your website is a must to ensure meaningful user experience and, as a result, your customers’ positive feedback and loyalty.

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Global companies have long used microservices. For example, the monolithic applications of Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Netflix at some point evolved into larger infrastructures. Brands have benefited from this decision and attracted even more audiences. But trending doesn’t mean monoliths are yesterday’s day. My team and I are not used to blindly chasing new trends. We always analyze when one or another option is effective and how it is safer to switch to it.

Our fintech project was built on a monolithic approach. This approach resembles a Rubik’s cube: if you take one piece out of it and assemble a new form or add other components, the cube will no longer work fully. Each element forms a single functionality. If any part is missing, broken or standing out of place, the colored box will not add up.

Why did you choose the monolith? First, it allows you to launch the project faster in a startup. When you have to present MVP in a month, but you have no specific requirements or product specifications, Monolith is the only savior. Its flexibility is manifested in the variety of tools that can be integrated to simplify development. In addition, changes or updates can be deployed at once rather than individually. Second, monolith is easy and fast to scale at the start. For our team, the benefits were clear.

More specialists, including newcomers, can join development on monolith. It is simple and straightforward to use. In such an application, all components are interconnected and interdependent. It will be much easier for any novice to understand the code and logic implemented in monolith than in microservices.

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The world became more complex in the mid-1990s. Companies coveted web applications that ran on the intranet to get rid of desktop deployments. And applications had to serve multiple departments, and sometimes even go beyond the company’s borders. A new paradigm, component-based development, also known as CBD, was established. It promised us reusability, scalability, flexibility, and the ability to extract code (usually written in COBOL). We started breaking down our systems into large functional parts and worked very hard to get these components to start communicating with each other. Java was invented, and suddenly everyone wanted to write code in Java (apparently some still do). Components ran on incredible technologies such as application servers and CORBA (look it up on Wikipedia to impress your colleagues). The good old days of object query brokers!

At the time, I was working at a large international bank trying to create a methodology for component-oriented development. Even with a well-armed team of Andersen consultants, it took us three years to write the damn thing. In the end, both the paradigm and the technology proved too complicated to write decent and well-functioning programs. It just didn’t work that way.

Service-oriented architecture.

At that point, in the early years of the 21st century, I thought we had gotten rid of distributed software development and started building web applications. Everyone seemed to bravely ignore Martin Fowler’s first law of object allocation — not to allocate objects. Gradually we moved on to the next distributed computing paradigm, repackaging the promise of component-oriented development into an updated set of technologies. We now started doing business process modeling (BPM) and implementing those processes on an enterprise service bus (ESB), with components providing services. We were in the era of service-oriented architecture, known as SOA.

After CBD, SOA seemed easier. As long as the components — vendors — were connected to the enterprise service bus, we figured out how to build scalable and agile systems. We now had much smaller components that we could extract from existing systems (written not only in COBOL, but also in PowerBuilder, .NET, and Java). The necessary books on development patterns were written, and the world was ready to get down to business. This time we got to pull it off!

This time I was working for an international transportation company, and we were building software around SAP middleware, supplying tools for both ESB and BPM. Now we didn’t just need Java and .NET developers, we also had middleware developers and SAP consultants working for us. And even though Agile was suggested to speed up development (I know, it’s not the right argument), projects were still too slow, moreover, when all the puzzle pieces fell into place, we started to realize that integration testing and deployment of new releases was getting more difficult by the day.

Finally: microservices!

I hope you’ll forgive me for such a long and confusing introduction to the subject of microservices. You may be thinking, “why do we need another article on microservices, isn’t there already enough literature on the subject?” In general, yes, there is enough. But if you look carefully at the stream of articles that can be found on the Internet, most of them only describe the benefits and features of microservices (sing “hallelujah”), some of them describe the few known examples of innovators (Netflix, Amazon, and Netflix, and Amazon, and Netflix…). And only a few articles actually dig a little deeper, and those tend to consist of a summation of the technologies used in implementing microservices. It’s all just getting started.

And here it doesn’t hurt to take a little history. Interestingly, the benefits and capabilities of the predecessors of microservices are still with us. Microservices seem to promise scalable and flexible systems based on small components that can easily be deployed independently, and thereby promote the best technology option for the component. In other words, the same promises we’ve bought into with CBD and SOA in the past. Nothing new here, but that doesn’t mean that microservices aren’t worthy of close consideration.

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Shipit workflows allow developers not only to configure tasks, but also to specify the order in which they are executed, whether synchronous or asynchronous execution is required, and the execution environment.

In this tutorial, we will install and configure Shipit to deploy a Node.js application from a local development environment to a production environment. We use Shipit to deploy the application and configure the remote server through the following steps:

Transferring Node.js application files from the local environment to the production environment (using rsync, git, and ssh).
installing the application dependencies (node modules).
setting up and managing Node.js processes on the remote server using PM2.

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, you will need the following:

• Two CentOS 7 servers (in this tutorial we will use app and web names for them) with a configured private network as instructed in the tutorial Configuring a Node.js application for a production environment in CentOS 7.
• Nginx web server (on the web server) secured with TLS/SSL as described in the tutorial Securing Nginx with Let’s Encrypt in CentOS 7. If you complete the prerequisites in chronological order, you will only need to complete steps 1, 4, and 6 on the web server.
• Installing Node.js and npm in a production environment. This tutorial uses version 10.17.0. To install it in macOS or Ubuntu 18.04, follow the Installing Node.js and Creating a Local Development Environment in macOS or the Installation with PPA section of the Installing Node.js in Ubuntu 18.04 guide.
• Installing Node.js also installs npm, this tutorial uses version 6.11.3.
• Local development computer with rsync and git installed.
• On macOS, you can use Homebrew to install them.
• For instructions on installing git on Linux distributions, see the Installing Git tutorial.

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So what is Cassandra? It’s a distributed storage system designed to manage large amounts of data while providing high availability without a single point of failure. The project hardly needs a long introduction, so I will only give you the main features of Cassandra that will be relevant in the context of a specific article:

• Cassandra is written in Java.
• The topology of Cassandra includes several levels:
• Node – a single deployed Cassandra instance;
• Rack – a group of Cassandra instances, united by some feature, located in one data center;
• Datacenter – a group of Cassandra instances located in one datacenter;
• Cluster – the set of all data centers.
• Cassandra uses an IP address to identify a node.
• Cassandra stores part of the data in RAM for fast write and read operations.

Now to the actual potential migration to Kubernetes.

Check-list for migration

Speaking of migrating Cassandra to Kubernetes, we hope to make it more manageable with the move. What will it take to do this, what will help?

1. Storage for data.

As already clarified, Cassanda stores some of its data in RAM – in Memtable. But there is another part of the data, which is stored on disk – as SSTable. To this data we add Commit Log entity, the records of all transactions, which are also saved to disk.

In Kubernetes, we can use PersistentVolume to store data. Thanks to well-designed mechanisms, working with data in Kubernetes is getting easier every year.

We will assign each pod with Cassandra its own PersistentVolume

It’s important to note that Cassandra itself implies data replication, offering built-in mechanisms for this. Therefore, if you are building a Cassandra cluster with a large number of nodes, there is no need to use distributed systems like Ceph or GlusterFS for data storage. In that case, it would make sense to store data on a node disk using local persistent disks or hostPath mounts.

Another issue is if you want to create a separate developer environment for each feature branch. In that case, the right approach would be to raise a single Cassandra node and store data in a distributed repository, i.e. the mentioned Ceph and GlusterFS would be your option. Then the developer will be confident that he will not lose test data even if one of the Kuberntes cluster nodes is lost.

2. Monitoring

A practically non-alternative choice for implementing monitoring in Kubernetes is Prometheus (we talked about this in detail in a related report). How is Cassandra doing with metrics exporters for Prometheus? And, more importantly, with the Grafana dashboards that fit them?

We chose the former because:

• JMX Exporter is growing and developing, while Cassandra Exporter failed to get proper community support. Cassandra Exporter still doesn’t support most versions of Cassandra.
• You can run it as a javaagent by adding the -javaagent flag.
• There is an adequate dashboad for it, which is incompatible with Cassandra Exporter.

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