I'm finishing building my MERN stack web application and I started to think about the optimal way of deploying it.
What should be mentioned is that one of the features of the app is to allow the user to upload and modify a moderate amount of images. I know that two main approaches would be to either:
host the app on a shared server like Namecheap and have the images stored in a filesystem
host it using cloud-based PaaS solutions like Heroku with additional storage like Cloudinary.
My question is - which of those would be an optimal solution for an app that will serve mostly for academic purposes + as an addition to a portfolio? What would be the best approach if the goal would be to create the portfolio's website along with the project's one?
If I understand correctly, I would say the first option is probably cheaper if you have the disk space for it. You would also be under the hood more, connecting the filesystem to wherever your app is hosted. Depending on how many users you anticipate, the second option could scale and end up costing a bit.
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I currently have a few apps that I provide to clients by setting them up on their own website. The app uses their own SQL database to record any transactions.
Recently, the number of customers I supply the app to has increased, leading to a higher maintenance work load as each installation must be managed separately.
I'm ready to move to the next level and want to host the app in a single cloud based environment so that I only have to maintain one instance. I would then provide access to that app to each client site, for example embed it in an iframe or perhaps deliver it via a sub-domain. I am not sure about where the DB would sit?
However, this is new territory for me and I'm not sure where to begin. The app is very small and quite simple. I've read a lot of stuff about SAAS but most of it seems quite enterprise level, I'm really looking for a simple and easy to use starting point.
What's the current best practice for this kind of setup and what might be a good guide to read or platform to use?
I'm developing a web app on the MEAN stack (and probably other stuff, like some way of storing images).
In the startup accelerator I'm working in I've been suggested to let go the IAAS approach for a PAAS one (namely AWS). I must admit being used to working on small scale apps on single virtual machines I'm very confused about how to approach the task and the whole PAAS thing.
Reading through AWS documentation looks like Elastic Beanstalk is the way to go for building a scalable web app. From my understanding it abstracts away the infrastructure management workload taking care of load balancing and resource scaling.
I decided to give it a try.
Now I'm a bit confused on how to setup the infrastructure. Particularly I'm wondering how to fit MongoDB it the puzzle.
I guess I shouldn't install it on the node.js machine but on a different one, so that the two can scale out depending on needs.
My questions are:
where and how should I install Mongo?
should I let go MongoDB in favour of something like DynamoDB? in this case how can I set up a local development environment?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
I'm developing an iOS social networking application that will involve users sharing and rating photos. I've spent about the last year or so on and off teaching myself how to develop in cocoa touch and now I'm ready to get started with the networking aspect of the app. Unfortunately, I have 0 networking / database experience and was wondering if anyone had any good advice on what things to consider and where / how to get started. In all likelihood I'm probably not going to build my own server and instead will go with something like rack space. Any advice would be appreciated.
Getting started to iOS Networking application. Here are the required things:-
You really need good backend developing experience in MySQL and complex database queries Plus experience in developing web services. At the root you need server host for backend and Admin module as you mentioned in question like race space or any other. You need to spend some months with mysql backend,web service and admin module implementation.
For fully functional social networking app your first task will be to manage users. Log in/Sign up will be there. Every user can post his status and can comment to other user's status.All status posts or comments will have their unique id and relationships to userid's table. May be image uploading and comments on photo will also be there So there will be lots of tables and relationships between them on backend side.
For Social Networking app, amount of work will be bigger on both backend/web service side and iOS side.
This is a pretty abstract question.
Eventually, you're going to have to focus on a particular architecture ( which database, which network technology), but before you do that, you need to get an outline idea of what the available options are and what the strengths and weaknesses of each are.
The server database is probably the easiest, as it doesn't make such a big difference. The choices are an sql database ( mysql, sqllite ....), not an sql database ( nosql, in memory tables) or some higher level abstraction where you can hide the differences and decide later ( core data for example). This may be constrained by your deployment decisions, you'll have more choices of rack options if you go for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) for example. If you stick with apple kit and use a MacOS X back end, you may have additional options for network architecture ( DistributedObjects for instance.
The network architecture is also a difficult choice from a wide range of choices. There are really dozens of options with lots of different pros and cons. As this is your first foray into this area, I'd count ease of use and availability of help high among your priorities. Here are a few popular technologies you might want to investigate ( in alphabetical order to minimise flammability :) ). DistributedObjects ( apple), JAXP, JSON, RPC, SOAP, XML ( bare, without the soapy bits).
One more question you should ask yourself is "Can you get away with just a database connection, or do you need to do processing on the back end?". If you can, you might be able to get away with just using a remote database and then you only need to learn core data ( which will still keep you busy for a long time).
Once you've decided what technologies you want to use, then you can start learning.
You mentioned using a hosted server. You'll want to be able to run a test server locally. Fortunately almost all the worthwhile options for both database and network technology will run on any unix-like machine, so you can probably use your regular dev machine.
Also bear in mind that some of these choices are religious, so everyone you read will have strong biases ( myself definitely included).
We're launching an iPhone app soon, and if everything goes well, we might reach up to tens of millions of user each day.
What server solution would you use for this? I guess a small VPS isn't enough. Is dedicated server a better choice? Is there any good hosting provider that can provide such servers?
I'm a newbie when It comes to servers, and would like some basic info about how to handle this.
Thanks in advance
Unfortunately, you are not really going to know the apps requirements until the app is launched. It all depends on how much the app needs to communicate with the server, and how often users are using the app. Depending on those variables and even more, a VPS might be enough, or you may need a dedicated box, or several. It also depends a lot on the performance of the VPS and dedicated boxes, furthermore it depends on how much access to the system you need.
Ultimately, it seems you may not even know how well the app is going to do, so I suggest you take the cheap/efficient route of using cloud computing. That way you will limit your expenses initially when you app has a small user base. Then your performance can amp up as quickly as your app requires (of course so will the price). That is the benefit of cloud computing, you will not be losing money in the beginning until you have the user base to use your server to its limit. Furthermore, you do not have downtime, etc when/if your server is no longer enough.
Check out Google's Cloud Computing to get a hint of what is possible. I personally like Google's cloud experience, but you have many more options with varying degrees of freedom that you will have to check out. Amazon of course is another possibility.
I'm trying to figure out how to make an iPhone application allow multiple users (that have it installed) share data among them. Now, the tricky part is that I don't want to host a server at my place (very poor ISP services), so I would opt for an online hosting solution. Next, by data I understand them to be able to, let's say, post a comment that would become readable to all the other users and to see what other users have said.
So, in my mind, I'm thinking of either having a file remotely hosted that could be accessed by multiple users at the same time, or a database of some sort or anything like that.
You haven't given us much to go on -- it's not even clear what your question is. If you're just asking how to go about this, I'd suggest the following steps:
Figure out what, specifically, you want the app to do, what data it will share, and who the data will be shared with. Is this an app that you're going to distribute publicly? Will all users share the same data, or will groups of users share with each other but not outside the group? How big is the data, and how is it structured? Can any part of the data change at any time (like a shared document) or will the data just be updated (like a SMS conversation)?
Decide how you want to host the data. If you'll need to serve a lot of users, you'll want some sort of database. If you'll need to serve a LOT of users, you'll want to make sure that your solution will scale easily. There are lots of hosting companies that provide access to databases like Oracle or MySQL, and that may be enough for your purposes. Or, you might want to look into some of the web services options, such as those offered by Google and Amazon. These can be fairly easy to use and have the advantage that they'll scale very well.
Get to work. You'll probably want to build a very basic version of your app around the same time that you're getting the server side working, so that it's easier to test. Once the server side is working and reliable, you can shift the focus back to building out the rest of your app.