Knowledge and practice in blockchain and cloud
The IT development market has been experiencing a real boom in demand for all kinds of web projects for a long time. Requests from venerable and very young companies, startups and government organizations are rapidly filling a variety of niches in the IT sector. Accordingly, the demand for qualified specialists in the field of front-end, back-end, administration and, of course, DevOps remains high. At the same time, not only a pool of theoretical knowledge is in demand, but also experience in its practical application. In fact, practice is the basis of everything, and the ratio of 80% practice and only 20% theory is true for all categories of work in IT.
A similar statement is also true for a new direction in web development – the development of blockchain-based applications. Many companies, trying to apply blockchain tools to their processes as quickly and efficiently as possible, have encountered the opposite effect, which in some cases even led to disappointment in this technology. In many cases, this was precisely the result of the fact that the companies’ own specialists, even assembled in teams, did not have sufficient practical experience in blockchain devops. A similar fact can be attributed to knowledge of cloud technologies.
For several years now, programmers have been creating programs that either immediately provide for work in the cloud, or, sooner or later, will “move” to the cloud. However, it is still not clear to everyone why we need these cloud technologies so much. Let’s start with the fact that cloud computing is more than a simple client-server interaction. The infrastructure of cloud providers is quite complex and filled with a large number of services. Nevertheless, not only new projects, but also those that are already fully functioning, are in dire need of this complex cloud infrastructure. Quite often you can hear the opinion that there is no need to pay a cloud provider, but it is quite possible to place all the necessary infrastructure on some of your own territory. Theoretically, this is, of course, possible, but to implement such an idea in practice, serious knowledge of the entire cloud architecture is required. We will list only the main positions from the entire volume of necessary knowledge: choosing the systems themselves for the infrastructure, setting up all these systems, installing and configuring the hardware itself, setting up infrastructure monitoring, setting up a database cluster, setting up various storages, setting up networks, etc. Of course, among IT specialists there are those who are eager to work on system architecture, however, in most cases, the best solution for using cloud technologies is to use the services of some cloud provider.
Problems with monolithic applications
Based on all of the above, we can conclude that the cloud is a large infrastructure that consists of different parts in which you can deploy your applications. In addition to the cloud architecture, you can use a monolithic architecture to deploy applications, which for all that, has its limitations. For example, any monolithic application works efficiently, but only until scalability problems arise due to the increasing size of the application. In addition, to make even a small change to one function, the entire platform must be compiled and tested. And such actions contradict the agile approach, which is the approach preferred by modern developers. Other disadvantages of monolithic architecture include:
– reduction in the speed of development and its complication, especially when it comes to large monolithic development,
– impossibility of scaling individual components,
– reduced reliability, since an error in one module can affect the availability of the entire application,
– the emergence of obstacles when introducing new technologies, since any changes in the infrastructure or development language affect the entire application and increase its cost,
– limitation of the capabilities of a monolithic application due to the technologies used in its development,
– the need to redeploy the entire monolithic application when even a small change is made.
Docker to help us
To find a way to avoid these problems, you need to turn to a tool like Docker. Without going into numerous details, we can give a brief description of the Docker tool as a system that allows you to isolate applications inside a container. Competing with a virtual machine, Docker significantly surpasses it in speed. This certainly does not mean that virtual machines have become less usable, because compared to a full-fledged virtual machine, Docker still loses some isolation and uses additional add-ons and tools. However, users often still prefer Docker, and they have compelling reasons for this. If the user chooses Docker, he only needs to install the Docker engine itself once within 5 minutes and then create containers based on any operating system in a couple of seconds. With virtual machines, the user spends 10 minutes installing each virtual machine for each application.
