A selection of the top articles and videos from the last week on SystemsDigest.com. Don't forget to check back regularly for daily updates from around the globe.
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Continuous integration and continuous deployment—known colloquially as CI/CD—are essential strategies for building modern software applications. The goal of these processes is to foster a culture of continuous updates. CI is the process by which an external machine (not your local development environment) fetches your app and dependencies and then runs a test suite to ensure everything in your application builds and runs correctly. After your CI passes and your changes are merged into the code base, CD takes over to ensure that your application is distributed to production environments—whether that’s a single server, a fleet of servers or even a mobile app store.
Financing in America can be a confusing and complex process. The myriad offerings, rates, and forms are daunting for even the savviest consumer. Credit Karma simplifies the lending process by anonymizing individual borrower data and procuring multiple financing offers depending on what the consumer is looking to finance. Whether it be a sofa, a car, or a house, customers no longer need to fill out multiple forms; Credit Karma is their one-stop credit application.
Whether you’re building web or mobile apps, quality assurance is a non-stop cycle of corrections, updates, and improvements. And, QA takes time. But with crowd testing, you can quickly identify software issues, fix them, and release them with confidence. Some call it crowdsourced or crowd testing. Testlio calls it networked testing. It’s an efficient way to utilize a crowd of testers to ensure complete coverage. With 1000s of device and OS combinations, on-demand testers test your applications in any location and any time, day or night.
With tech constantly innovating, various tools and software need to be able to work simultaneously. API's are what makes this possible. The API provides software with a way to interact and communicate. This is how different applications connect, whether it's two internal apps or integrating an app into another company's platform. However, with APIs, as in any software integration, many challenges are likely to arise. To mitigate these challenges, an API management strategy should be in place.
In a world where minutes of downtime can overthrow SLAs, cause significant amounts of customer frustration, and as a matter of fact cost millions of dollars, observability is shifting left in the software development life cycle. Developers are frustrated by erroneous, flaky, and long-running tests that fail builds within GitHub Actions continuous integration pipelines. With the release of our new GitHub Actions integration, the Foresight agent will be added to your Maven and Gradle super easily. We built a “plugin” to make the experience more seamless when integrating Foresight to unlock granular detailed analytics on their tests (unit, integration, e2e, etc.).
As the post-pandemic world emerges, the future of events such as summits, conferences or concerts is brighter than ever. Thanks to hybrid events, in-person events are now doubled by online happenings, which allows event organizers to reach much larger, geographically distributed audiences. For organizers and ticket distributors, providing a great ticket-booking experience to their global audiences has become more important than ever. In this guide we’ll show you how to build a ticket booking solution that allows you to process and distribute large quantities of ticket data for live, virtual or hybrid conferences, to and from a large number of customers - with reliability and speed.
The internet has evolved from static web pages and long loading times to super-fast progressive web applications that can install themselves on client devices. The focus of web applications shifted from providing content to offering a captivating experience. As more and more people join the internet, the demand for visually appealing and friction-free web applications continues to grow. A web application is similar to a standard desktop or mobile application except that it can run on a web browser. Such apps hold immense growth potential since nearly all computing devices support accessing the web using a browser. However, due to its vast nature, it is impossible to create the perfect web application in all cases.
When your marketing team manages a myriad of social media platforms (from Facebook to TikTok), it is hard to keep an eye on the ROI of your marketing efforts. Each platform comes with its own set of dashboards that provide marketing analytics. But the trends and insights from those dashboards are limited to each specific platform. Knowing how you performed on Google Ads tells you very little whether you should increase your Facebook advertising expenditures. So when the various stakeholders (from sales to the CMO) come knocking with questions about marketing results, you have to give them more than 20 spreadsheets of fractured highlights and overviews.
Currently, electric vehicles make up less than 1% of cars currently on the road, according to global business-focused news organization, Quartz. However, within the next decade that will rapidly change. By 2040, it is estimated that electric vehicles will make up roughly 33% of all cars on the road, according to a Bloomberg New Energy Finance study. As the electric vehicle market will only continue to grow, it is essential that you have a clear understanding of electric vehicle development and electric vehicle software. Read along or jump ahead to the section that interests you the most.
Software-based automation is a relatively young concept that’s rapidly gaining popularity—as reflected by the veritable explosion of software as a service (SaaS) offerings in the last decade. Gartnre® estimates, “software as a service (SaaS) remains the largest market segment and is forecast to grow to $117.7 billion in 2021, application infrastructure services (PaaS) is anticipated to grow by a higher margin at 26.6%”. Despite the deluge of process automation services out there, it’s not always clear how automation tools work, the differences between tools, and how they can optimize business processes.
In 2020, in response to the pandemic, we saw an urgent shift to SaaS and various emerging technologies. It was covered at length in “Introducing Trends 2021 – 'The Great Digital Switch'.” Largely driven by necessity, organizations needed to make drastic moves “to keep the lights on” and cater to operations in a more virtual and remote style. This big leap forward drastically changed the IT landscape and infrastructure in a lot of organizations.
Big data analytics is the practice of processing high volumes of data (think terabytes and petabytes) which businesses use to reveal insights, patterns, and actionable decisions. Such data comes from multiple sources and can be structured or unstructured. What makes data “big”? There’s data, and then there’s big data. Today’s businesses rely on the power of big data to get ahead in today’s fast-moving world. But they also need some truly advanced analytics and data science to understand and make the best use of large datasets.
A more agile and efficient infrastructure is key to realizing the cost savings and productivity gains businesses needed to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. Recent surveys by Roger Magoulas & Steve Sawyer, May 19, 2020, show that 88% of enterprises are currently using cloud in some form or another. This adoption is not surprising as clouds have been around now for several decades since Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in 2002. What may be surprising is that 86% of IT organizations are prioritizing containers for more applications, and much of that is occurring in the cloud or clouds as customers move to multicloud environments.
An API essentially paly the role of a software intermediary that allows two applications to talk to each other. Every time you use an application like Facebook, send an instant message, or check the weather on your phone, you are using an API. The API is more than middleware however — it’s grown into an innovative business concept that can transform your business and digital strategy. When using APIs though, there are a variety of mistakes that developers can make. Read on to find out more on common mistakes when developing APIs and understand how to get it right from the start.
Microservices are a style of architecture used by many organizations for software development. In the past, the IT industry used monolithic or service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions as the standard. However, the lack of dynamic scalability of this type of architectural system is no longer adequate for the increasing complexity of today’s infrastructures. Microservices addresses this by providing a highly agile and scalable alternative. So what exactly are microservices, and what is their practical use? How can you best use them? All the answers are in this beginner’s guide to microservices.
Nurturing your customer prospects is a crucial task to increase your conversion rates—so how can you make sure that valuable leads don’t fall through the cracks? That’s exactly where software like Marketo comes in. Marketo is a marketing automation tool to help standardize and automate your marketing funnel, helping push your prospects along the buyer’s journey from awareness to acquisition.
DynamoDB is a NoSQL database offered by AWS. It can be a great way to avoid adding load to your primary database when you need tens of thousands of reads/writes per second. In this article, Julie Kent walks us through the basics of using DynamoDB with Rails.
Actionable marketing dashboards are a key to any marketing campaign. To get the most out of your campaign, it’s important to choose the marketing dashboard that will best fit your business goals. Read on to learn more about actionable marketing dashboards, what makes a good marketing dashboard, and discover 20 examples of marketing dashboards filled with valuable insights.
