📊SaaS business model description, 🤩 unique SaaS ideas, ways to validate the idea, and suggestions for building an MVP.

☕️Awesome SaaS ideas for a product in 2023

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Awesome AI-generated SaaS ideas for your new product

**Software** drives our world. Nowadays, most businesses, phones, and cars depend on coding. As a result, software plays a significant role in modern society. As a result, software development quality is crucial. But what exactly software development quality means? Let's look at the meaning and principles of quality-driven software development.

**Quality-Driven Software Development** is a process, a set of best practices, and a framework. A high-performing team delivers exceptional results using methods and approaches refined over decades of successful projects.

Software products are characterized based on their functionality and quality. The quality goods will accomplish what users are searching for. Fulfilling the SRS documentation's requirements can explain the fitness. Although the "fitness-of-purpose" definition is a satisfactory description of quality in most devices like cars, tables, and grinding machines' fit of purpose' is hardly a whole lot acceptable in the case of software products. Consider software products that work correctly and functionally. So the program performs all functions described within SRS. The interface is almost impossible to understand.

## What are the five core principles of software quality-driven software development?

For quality-driven development, it is essential to start from the beginning, maintain a systematic approach to quality, take ownership of quality, and remember to be creative.
Developing quality software is something that only happens in stages. There is much more to it than tools, methods, and bug counts. 
Quality is crucial to digital transformation, so you should involve your entire organization. 
In practice, there are five cornerstones of quality-driven software development. So, let's analyze each one.
![Frame 2987 (1).png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/11/10/Frame_2987_1_1a53564f20.png)
### 1) Specification

The agreement between stakeholders and the developers is a significant factor in software development. 
There can be a lot of challenges associated with writing a good software specification. It takes an understanding of business or process, technology capabilities, limitations, and good communication skills to register a quality specification that is understandable to both - project members and non-technical decision makers.
To verify that the specifications are met, a third party reviews them to ensure such factors as: 

- comprehensible
- project-specific
- achievable
- testable
- based on priorities

### 2) Design

In software design, requirements become blueprints. It takes creativity, experience, technical expertise, and a commitment to quality to create a good concept. During this step, it is crucial to maintain quality to achieve a successful outcome.

Software design is an essential factor in enhancing quality and productivity. Embedded quality control ensures the website or app is practical. Before coding begins, quality control provides a primary understanding interface. Investing time and resources in the design review is more cost-effective than reworking during the coding phase.

### 3) Coding

Clean, quality code does not just happen by accident. Developing quality-driven projects requires developers to commit and be passionate about them. Code can be written in several ways, but one should always strive to meet high-quality standards.

- Simplicity is a key 
- You should not overdo and reinvent the wheel
- Continual unit testing against the requirements

These principles are a great place to start. In addition to these core principles, there are many others, such as robustness, maintainability, usability, and efficiency.

### 4) Testing
![Frame 2988 (1).png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/11/10/Frame_2988_1_9292d616ae.png)
And the last cornerstone for quality-driven software development is testing. It is the most misunderstood and underrated part of software development. Defects are the result of poor testing. Since the first three foundations failed, testing is the last defense against poor quality reaching customers and end users.

It is necessary to integrate testing into the software development process and to push it out of the end of the cycle.

Finding defects is not the definition of successful testing. Finding the problems and resolving them is the goal. As a result, you must create test plans, develop a comprehensive test strategy, prepare the environments and data, and ensure that all procedures and results are documented.

### 5) Security

As part of the development process, quality-driven software assurance helps identify errors and flaws in the software code and design, so that money and time are not wasted. This way, the end product is secure, competitive, and performs as expected. Software quality assurance practice can enhance the reputation of a business and ensure user and client satisfaction.

## Why are software quality metrics used for quality-driven software development?

A quality measure is a way to evaluate your products, services, and processes. Quality metrics are a tool to determine customer satisfaction levels within a company.

Software Quality Metrics (SQMS) are an essential management tool; they represent numbers representing information about software or its development processes. Specific metrics measure code quality based on its complexity or ability to pass testing tests. Other process-related indicators describe software workflow and productivity. Software quality measures are standard practice in software development firms as they give them a better idea of how a software product works.

Quantitative quality metrics measure how large a software product can be, how many lines it contains, and how many bug occurrences per thousand lines. Qualitative coding quality measures include maintainability, readability, clarity, efficiency, and documentation quality.

Although many can be done to improve the quality of the product during such phases, the following are fixes that take place so the defect can be resolved as quickly as possible at a high-quality level.

## Final thoughts

Building quality-driven software applications do not happen by accident. The process of software quality assurance requires a collaborative effort from the very beginning.

Quality is not a universal property of software. It depends on the stakeholders` context and goals.

No matter how well you do it the first time, you can always expect it to become invalid over time. Hence, continuous quality control is the only way to solve the problem. It is essential to continuously evaluate quality control measures based on a product's properties and the organization's quality goals.

As a result, software professionals would only have to spend less time fixing defects and maintaining existing applications. Using this time more productively, we can innovate solutions to make the process more efficient. Furthermore, this would reduce the organization's costs and enhance its reputation.

An article about quality-driven software development, metrics, opportunities and tools

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Quality-driven software development: meaning, possibilities, and tools

Microservices architecture is something that is often mentioned as the architecture to follow, specially in cloud based solutions. But why is it so, and is it really the best option all the time? In this article, I'll guide you through some of the good and the bad, show some real life use cases of it in action, along with best practices to follow if it is indeed the right choice for you.

## Brief history

Software was done traditionally as monoliths. A product consisted of a multitude of features that lived inside the same codebase, were maintained and operated as a huge, concise block. Eventually, due to problems such as single points of failures, scaling issues and coupling, came the need to split up the software into smaller, more manageable pieces. Along this path, came SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), that relied on the web to interface between smaller services.
![Architecture evolution from monolith to Microservices](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/Frame_2984_419bedabaf.png)
As SOA became finer grained and service sizes became smaller, also the ecosystem around it changed. With the introduction of PaaS (Platform as a Service) and the cloud, it became easier to create very small, focused services. Thus microservices started gaining traction.

## Advantages of microservices advantages over Monolithic architecture

So what do microservices bring to the table that make them such an exciting alternative to monoliths? Let's take a look at some sections where there's clear advantages.

### Ownership

When the an application is split into smaller parts, you can have teams or individuals focused on specific parts of the application. This increases the ownership sense: As an individual contributor, you own that microservice, it's yours. It's never "someone else's problem" when it comes to your microservice. This can bring a sense of pride when your microservice works flawlessly, as well as focusing expertise on certain domain areas.

### Scalability

Easier horizontal scaling as opposed to vertical scaling. When the service to scale is smaller, you can fine-tune scaling better, achieving better service availability and cost reduction. Containers (think Docker), offer a lot to better scalability, as scaling up or down means adding or removing copies of containers that needs scaling, with potentially no need to add more servers.

### Blast radius reduction

Having the application split into tiny pieces makes it easier to repair or replace certain parts. If a bug caused a microservice to crash, only a localised part of the whole service will be impacted. Recovery or mitigation become simpler, thus reducing MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery).

### API-first design

The way microservices interact with each other is through APIs. It's essentially a contract where you tell other services what you can do, and what you need to do it. In microservices, APIs must be 'first class citizens'. Forcing services to always have an API, from first design, educates the design to follow from the start. The service must fulfil the API needs, not the other way around.

### Technological freedom

Since communication is done through APIs, the technology used inside each microservice can be tailored to the needs of the functionality. Need a highly performant daemon service? Maybe C is the right language. Need a data analysis service? Perhaps Python is more adequate for that, with its specialised data analysis tools.

## Disadvantages of microservices architecture

The advantages sound great! So why shouldn't microservices be used everywhere?

### Added operational effort

Having a microservices architecture means that each service will have dedicated infrastructure, be it cloud resources or physical servers. Each service will have an independent resource stack, and each stack will have an independent release cycle. In case you follow a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery for release, this means a specific release pipeline for each microservice. The added operational effort is not only during setup stages, but it follows through the lifespan of the service. Development teams need to manage specific code bases and repos, code changes, approval workflows, automated tests, alarms, deployment and rollback procedures. At scale it is common to have development teams own 1 or a couple of microservices, and this complexity is already accounted for in a standard 6-8 people development team, but in smaller teams and companies there is an added DevOps effort.

### Increased communication complexity

This concern is twofold: first, there's a cost to managing communication between microservices. Distributed systems are inherently more complex to set up. They require an increased development time to define APIs, operations and clear access permissions between resources. Additionally, communication changes are more cumbersome to perform. They require new operations, methods or API versions to be released while keeping support for existing clients and offering clear deprecation paths and procedures.
![Graph of microservice dependencies at Amazon in 2008. From twitter.com/werner/status/741673514567143424?lang=en](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/image_148_ec443c66cc.png)
The second part of this topic is organisational communication. Once you have teams owning specific microservices, any project or feature request involving multiple microservices requires inter-team communication. In big projects or milestones these efforts might even need roadmap alignment. Although these orchestration constraints can also happen in monolithic systems, there's a less strict separation of concerns there, meaning the politics of who-owns-what are more flexible and potentially less impactful.

### Service discoverability

With many services online there is another component that is vital in architecture, a Service Registry that manages service availability, health status and connections. For instance based microservices, this can take the form of a load balancer, whereas with containers, container orchestration tools like Docker Swarm or Kubernetes have this functionality built in.

### Testing

This can be both an advantage and disadvantage and it is important that you follow microservices architecture best practices to avoid some of the testing pitfalls. On the one hand it is simpler to test a clear domain with a smaller test suite. However, to perform end-to-end testing or user acceptance testing (UATs) you need to either mock other services or deploy the full system. At scale, UATs are hard to perform for individual teams. They are usually done in environments that already contain the full system, for example a Beta stage where all teams deploy their individual services but already have service wiring in terms of communications and interoperability.

### Changes in application design

When approaching an application, thinking in terms of microservices architecture changes how to design and develop components. It might give added flexibility and modularity but it also introduces additional constraints and challenges.

Sometimes application size doesn't translate to complexity and not all architectures are suited to follow a microservice approach. It's not a silver bullet! As anything in software development, there's a balance to strike between development effort and maintainability, a give and take.

## Use cases

### Dropbox
![1057500b-bf4d-4bd8-acdc-dbe94e49d201.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/dropbox_43fabc9835.png)
Dropbox is a cloud storage service that allows saving files in shared folders sync them to multiple devices.

Dropbox started with a monolithic backend service, called Metaserver. Over the years, as the Dropbox development team increased in size, the pains of working in a monolith increased.

There were many efforts to destructure this monolith into smaller pieces, not all of them successful. An initial effort failed due to reliability issues with the new solution.

After some reassessment, Dropbox decided to use a Hybrid approach. Instead of moving everything to microservices, and suffer the downsides of having microservices, they decided to structure all simple services inside a service called Atlas, while big components would stay as they were, owned by large teams. The reasoning for creating Atlas is, most of the small services are not critical enough to warrant caring about supporting services for each of the microservices independently. Atlas would manage scaling, alarming and other concerns of these services altogether.

Atlas works as a managed service, similar to AWS Fargate, where developers should only care about the code. The target of Atlas is to "provide the majority of benefits of SOA, while minimising the operational costs associated with running a service."

### Uber
![71572a5e-638b-4c4f-98c0-f87e9f573c49.jpeg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/Frame_2985_32b541affc.png)
Uber is a transportation company with an app that allows passengers to use a taxi-like service while also allowing users to register as drivers to charge fares and get paid.

Uber started off as [2 monolithic services](https://www.uber.com/en-PT/blog/microservice-architecture/{externalnofollow}). As the company grew from dozens to hundreds of engineers, the pains of having a codebase started to appear, with coupling and availability risks as some of the cited. Uber claims that they could not reach the level of scale and quality offered today without the microservices architecture.

The interesting part about with this use case comes when going from hundreds to thousands of engineers. In that part of their growth, system complexity started to arise as a critical problem. A simple feature can touch multiple services, meaning additional communication with multiple teams, design and code reviews.

To tackle the increased complexity, Uber took steps to reduce granularity with DOMA (Domain Oriented Microservices Architecture). How does DOMA work in a nutshell?

- Organize microservices in collections of services, named domains.
- Organize domains in collections, called layers. Domains inside layers have dependencies in common
- Create gateways that serve as single points of interface with domains.
- Domains should be agnostic from other domains. To share context, Uber uses an extension architecture to create extension points between domains.

With the adoption of DOMA, Uber claims to have been "able to reduce onboarding time by 25-50%".

## Best practices

### Single responsibility principle

Each service should handle a single logical domain and you should establish clear boundaries between services.

### Guarantee decoupling between services

Is your service API exposing internal concepts? Does the client need to know any inner property to make calls on handle responses? If you cannot replace one service internal logic, without impacting clients, that is a red flag that your architecture in coupled. It is one thing to deploy different services and another to have them decoupled.

### Don't persist communication artefacts

It might be tempting to persist objects directly from the API controller, but if you persist communication objects, you cannot change persistence layer without impacting clients.

### Eventually consistent persistence layer

It is a common pattern for micro-services to communicate via Publish/Subscribe pattern and handle notifications asynchronously. In many scenarios, it is simpler and more accurate to follow an eventually consistent approach, where an event notifies the service, but event details are ignored, and query the publisher as the source of truth. This way the end result of processing a notification stream will be the same regardless of message order.

### Extend the microservice to the data storage

Microservices expect separation of concerns even at the data storage level. If this doesn't happen, the coupling persists. If there's ever an issue with the database, all microservices depending on that database are impacted.

When possible, split the data persistence layer for each microservice. As with the code itself, this grants flexibility to choose a specific solution that works best for the target data, instead of having to work for all use cases in the monolith.

### Use smart endpoints, dumb pipes

The idea with this statement is to reinforce the idea that the microservices should own all business logic. When it comes to communication, knowing how to communicate should live inside the microservice (the endpoints), not in the communication protocol (the pipe). This is why microservices tend to use "simple" communication protocols, such as REST and message queues, as opposed to [BPEL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Execution_Language{externalnofollow}) or [Enterprise Service Bus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus{externalnofollow}).

When microservices own all the business logic, there's no need for another external entity that needs to change when your microservices does, so less moving parts to worry about.

### Monitoring is a must

A side effect of having a monolith is that, when something breaks, it's very likely you will notice it, given the blast radius. With microservices, not so much. To guarantee the best availability to your end users, a thorough monitoring and alarming process, based on SLAs, must be adopted. Key monitoring targets include latency, number of errors, resource usage (CPU, Memory, Disk Space). Having the right level of monitoring for each service will allow the service to react to unusual situations (i.e. fatal bugs that require rollbacks, or traffic spikes that require scaling or rate-limiting) in a timely manner and leave your customers happy.

### Use an API Gateway

There are several benefits that arise when putting an API Gateway in front of a microservice architecture.

One is the reverse proxy nature of an API Gateway. It hides internal microservice endpoints under a single public endpoint. This allows flexibility when changing the underlying services. Consider migrations, where you're splitting the monolith up into smaller services, or you are building a brand new service to replace another one. The flip from old to new can be hidden behind an API Gateway, where the public endpoint for the service doesn't change, but the underlying service does.

Another benefit is centralising some of the cross-cutting concerns that API Gateway manages well. API Gateways already handle functionality such as authentication, authorization, response caching and throttling, so extracting this from each microservice into an API Gateway seems logical to keep microservices focused. Consider the API Gateway as its own microservice, responsible for tasks related to requests.

### Logical architecture and physical architecture may differ

Microservices are a logical concept. The implementation of such a concept doesn't have to be a 1-to-1 copy of the design. Due to size or logical boundaries, you may have multiple services enclosed in the same microservice. To exemplify this, let's conceptualise an example of 1 microservice composed of 2 services. If we have a User Search service and a User Details service, that have isolated codebases, but interact with the same database. It may make sense to logically call this the User Data microservice, while keeping the two service separate. This keeps them together within the same business logic boundary, but allow them to scale independently.

## How do I start?

So you figured out the a microservices architecture is the right call for your project. You've designed the architecture, and are ready to implement. I would suggest not reinventing the wheel here. Microservices have been around for a while, and there's tools and services you can use to make the experience better. A lot of these have the best practices proposed in mind, so less stressing about that. So let's take a look at some tools to get you started.

### Docker

Docker is an open source platform used to build and run distributed applications, in the form of containers. Although containers are not synonymous with microservices, their usage shares a lot of the advantages of using microservices: isolation and scalability being two of them. Most of the tools below expect applications to be containerised, making Docker or other containers a must-use.

### Amazon ECS

Amazon ECS is Amazon's managed container orchestration offering. It's works a layer above Amazon EC2, where you don't deal with instances directly, but you need to manage instances, which includes scaling, monitoring, patching. Because of this, ECS is free, and you pay only for the EC2 instances you use.

### Amazon Fargate

Fargate differs from ECS on how the containers run. With Fargate, task execution is serverless, so no need to worry about EC2 instances, that's transparent to the user. This means, there's far less operational effort with this solution, although you also have less flexibility. In terms of pricing, you pay per task execution time instead of per instance, which may seem like an increase in cost at first glance, but it's possible to have a badly implemented ECS solution cost more than Fargate.

### Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration framework. Originated from Google Borg, it's considered the standard in container orchestration. Many of the features offered by Kubernetes out-of-the-box offer a lot of the requirements for microservices, such as service discovery and load balancing.

You can think of Kubernetes in a lower layer of abstraction compared to Amazon ECS, nothing in Kubernetes is managed for you, you will need to setup all the details. An advantage of this is that Kubernetes is vendor agnostic, so you can integrate with any cloud vendor, or even use it on-premises with your company infrastructure.

If this level of fine grained configuration is not what you need, but you still want to use Kubernetes, a managed Kubernetes service like Amazon EKS may be the right choice.

### Amazon EKS

Amazon EKS is a managed Kubernetes service. Instead of using Amazon's proprietary orchestration like ECS, it uses a Kubernetes management layer for the same purpose. This makes it the more seamless transition if you're already using Kubernetes, but can be more difficult to configure if not. Choose EKS if you plan to go multicloud in the future (since Kubernetes is vendor agnostic), and expect to scale to a large degree.

### AWS Lambda

The one exception on the list to using containers. AWS Lambda is a Function as a Service offering. They offer arguably the easiest path to start using microservices, in terms of ease of development and setup. AWS Lambda is particularly useful for handling short running tasks, such as APIs, or very simple tasks. In those cases, the complexity of containers plus manages orchestration services may not be worth the effort.

## Conclusion

It's important to not pick microservices architecture because it's the new shiny thing on the industry, but to understand the benefits and drawbacks and choose accordingly. In this article we analysed the good and the bad about microservices, and offered some advice on how to begin and do it right from start.

An article about Microservices, their benefits, challenges, real-life examples, and best practices

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Quick dive into Microservices: benefits, challenges, real-life examples, and best practices

**Web design** is the long route of creating content for a brand. Modern website design is the combo of how things look and how things work. Moreover, it is not limited to websites but includes other uses such as web apps, mobile apps, etc.

The website design is not just a nice picture. It's the crucial solution for the business image, making the brand recognizable and valuable in the market. So, it is not enough to have a product. You have to make an effective, efficient, and visually pleasing display. 

UX and UI design services allow companies to verify business ideas, ultimately saving money on development. Business owners can test every function before launching it with digital prototyping and iterative outlines. In this way, companies can avoid unnecessary expenses while still getting an accurate and realistic evaluation of their app or website.

By using an application or website prototype, the company can determine which functions are useless or need to be improved. With UX design services, the development process can be flexible, and money can be saved in the long run. Correctly implemented prototypes and validated features can help companies avoid change requests and ensure no requirements are missed.

Nowadays, many successful companies choose between in-house and outsourced web design. Let's try to understand the difference between these two types of hiring web designers and find the best for your company. 

## In-house web design

If you hire someone to create your website design in-house, they will only work on your projects. A complete focus will speed up the process.

### Pros of in-house web designers:

1. **Priority**
Your company is always in the first place for an in-house web designer. Having someone work on your site in-house means only working on that website. With an entire focus, in-house web designers can deliver faster.

2. **In-depth understanding of your business**
In-house web designers work with you for a long time, which gives them a deeper understanding of the company's needs and values. With an in-house team member, you're saving the time it takes to explain all project details to an outsider.

3. **Communication**
Face-to-face conversations and tracking of work allow you to monitor and control in-house designers. As a result of an in-house team, you can see the work results and interact with them. With an in-house web development team, you have complete control over all aspects of your project. Each development step will be explained in detail, including progress and setbacks. You will be able to track the progress of your web development project more efficiently.
Moreover, you understand and build a particular system of values, norms, rules, traditions, and principles driven by which your team works and your business grows. Often, corporate culture performs a motivational function by inspiring the team to achieve specific goals.

4. **Data security**
It is easier to secure your business when you work with reliable workers you know well. It is the question of intellectual property, and it has to be a priority.

### Cons of in-house web designers

When we speak about in-house workers, that means additional expenses. An in-house web development team would be more expensive and would require you to hire more experts. It is essential to consider both the monthly salary and the mandated benefits such as paid leave and health insurance. In addition, you will need to consider HR services, equipment, personnel management, software, office space, and facilities.

Hiring in-house means incurring all costs without knowing whether your product will succeed. It can be hard to find skilled designers, especially in small cities. Many of the best talents have already been employed.

The next drawback of an in-house design team is a slow start. It is acсeptable for big projects but devastating for small ones. As a result, in-house web design resources become ineffective for short-term projects.

## Outsourced web design
![Frame 2982.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/Frame_2982_656ce684fc.png)
It's worth mentioning that outsourcing businesses are prevalent in today's IT industry. Moreover, the number of new outsourcing companies is growing each day. It has pros and cons, but it is needless to say that outsourced web design brings excellent results into the global market. So, let's analyze this in detail.

### Benefits of outsourced web design

1. **Reduced cost**
One of the most incredible things about web design outsourcing is the opportunity to save money. You pay for the result without other expenses when you hire an outsourced web designer or company. It saves you a vast amount of time and cost of building a perfect in-house team. Hiring a fully staffed outsourcing company to execute your project is much more cost-effective than hiring and training your team.

2. **Save time using specific skills for specific projects**
Among the benefits of outsourcing is access to a large talent pool. You can choose people with excellent qualifications for the job, which means the projects usually get done faster. You can outsource web design work in various ways depending on the type of cooperation you choose and the country your outsourced vendor is from.

3. **New perspectives**
New workers can infuse a fresh look at the project, cutting-edge technology, tools, and solutions. It will help achieve the best result in a short time. Working with a third-party company will allow you to produce new ideas for your project and bring fresh perspectives. Web designers are incredibly creative people with the ability to find extraordinary solutions to tricky tasks.

4. **Global access**
Finding a web design outsourcing agency that delivers quality work within your budget is possible regardless of location. Digitalization provides endless opportunities around the world. And for the current unstable world situation, this benefit is quite crucial.

5. **Shift the focus**
When outsourcing website design, you have more time to focus on other essential business tasks. It is a great time to expand your business, get more clients, and do marketing. With a good outsourcing web development agency, you will always be able to stay involved in the process via email, project management tools, and Skype conversations. It would be possible for you to communicate with your team throughout the project's lifecycle.

### Drawbacks of outsourcing

Outsourcing web design has its cons as any other model. You can collide with a need for more transparency and control over the development process. Also, there is a risk of disclosing confidential information. Nevertheless, outsourced web design gives you a fresh look at things and better results. It's a cost-effective way to get the desired web design.

## Final thoughts

Outsourcing the design of your website adds new creative flair and gives a unique perspective on business strategy. Outsourcers can help you solve significant tasks.

The outsourcing team will complete the task much faster and more effectively. So, it is vital to choose an outsourced website design firm that can handle complex tasks, and it also determines the budget you can spend on the project. The use of outsourcing has historically been viewed as a way to reduce costs and optimize operations. Experienced professionals can quickly meet deadlines with the best possible results. In 2025 IT outsourcing will generate a value of $3976 million based on the following trends.

An article compares in-house and outsourced web design 👩‍💻👨‍💻

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In-house vs outsourced web design

In a previous [article](https://www.ecdevstudio.com/blog/quick-dive-into-microservices-benefits-challenges-real-life-examples-best-practices/), an introduction microservices architecture was given and pros and cons over other architectures were provided. Focusing on how to organize microservices around development teams, you can see some of the company structure mirrored in it. As [Conway's Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law{externalnofollow}) states:

>Any organisation that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organisation's communication structure.

The quote conveys that there's a link between system design and organisational structure. In this article, I'll show how microservices architecture work together with a team oriented concept.

## Exploring the team structure

With a microservices architecture, a team may own one or more microservices. With that in mind, what's the right team structure, both in terms of size and composition?

### Team size concerns

In regards to size, Amazon suggests a [two-pizza team](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/introduction-devops-aws/two-pizza-teams.html{externalnofollow}), striking a balance between collaboration (the smaller the team, the more tight knit it is), communication delays (communication inside team is quick, while inter-team is slow) and domain knowledge.

What if the company only has one development team of four people? At this size, it's hard to justify the maintenance overhead that comes with a microservices architecture. Remember that microservices expect isolation, isolated continuous deployment and continuous integration, APIs and so on. Consider keeping a monolith instead, and enforce strong decoupling design patterns in the code, so that, if the need arises to migrate to microservices, that migration is smoother.

### How to compose a team?

When it comes to team composition, following the two-pizza team approach while considering the microservices architecture, a team needs to be well rounded. Since teams are expected to have single ownership of services, there needs to be skill and expertise from beginning to end of the process. In essence, this means a team must be cross-functional, having knowledge in customer communication (customers here include other internal teams), software development, infrastructure, system administration, operations, QA. With this paradigm shift certain job titles that used to be a lot less common with the monolith architecture started to appear: Full Stack Developers, DevOps Engineers, to name a few. A potential side effect is that team members that enjoy certain development areas, such as UI/UX, may need to work on other parts of the microservices, which may alienate them, making them feel less useful or productive.
![Change in team composition from monolith to microservices architecture](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/Frame_2980_13dde0607a.png)
## Team interaction with microservices architecture

When different teams own microservices that interact, eventually there will be features that force the actual teams to also interact. This can be a small request, such as needing a new endpoint to get more data from a service, or a much larger project that spans changes in multiple microservices, where teams need to organize their work and milestones as a joint effort.

### Communication as signal to the right architecture

The amount of times inter-team interaction happens may inform how well your microservices architecture is designed. If anytime a microservice changes, the team needs to request changes to another team, that means those microservices are tightly coupled. In those situations, a few outcomes are possible:

Reorganise teams, so that those changes happen within one team in the future. This may require shuffling employees around, which is not ideal.

Refactor microservices, if possible extracting the service or part of service that provokes this unwanted interaction. This creates the least amount of churn, but is not always possible.

Leave it as is, and live with the communication effort and time overhead. If the interactions have low frequency, this can be the best choice.

## Team oriented leadership

Having teams working as independent units, as owner of their destiny, can be a hard pill to swallow for company leadership. Being able to accept that you'll have a looser management style is as much part of the microservices architecture success as choosing the right tools. Trust that team members want the best for their services, and in turn, the full product.

## Conclusion

Working as a team focused on a specific domain, independent, with minimal external influence is a surefire way of keeping a development team happy and increase talent retention. Microservices help with this culture by making sure the domains are isolated and owned by expert teams on their own.

An article describing how microservices architecture works with a team-oriented concept

thumbnail_Frame 2979.png

Frame 2979.png

Microservices as a team-centered concept

In a lot of real life scenarios, services need to store information in databases tables. The tables contain critical information, where changes need to be tracked for security, accountability and regulatory requirements. Typically, this sort of action is not time critical, so adding an audit trail with the same availability and access times as the rest of your application is not advised, especially if you don't want your costs to increase unexpectedly.

In this blog post I will detail an example of how to extract changes made to an Amazon DynamoDB table and store the audit trail of those changes in an Amazon S3 (Amazon Simple Storage Service) bucket, making use of AWS Kinesis Data Stream and AWS Kinesis Firehose.

## Architecture

![afe2af11-e264-48ab-825c-4b24ac957eb1.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/afe2af11_e264_48ab_825c_4b24ac957eb1_ec971b9cc2.png)

### Change data streaming

On the initial step of our design, an AWS Kinesis Data Stream is attached to the Amazon DynamoDB table. What this means is, every time a new change happens in the table, that change is captured and kept in a data stream.

The format of the data sent includes: a timestamp of the captured change, the primary key (will be the partitionKey + sortKey), and a before and after image of the changed item. With the before and after, it's possible to understand what particular values have changed.

After this, a consumer, in this case, AWS Kinesis Firehose, must retrieve data from this stream. Its only purpose on the architecture is to retrieve data from the AWS Kinesis Data Stream and into an Amazon S3 bucket.

### Audit trail storage

When data reaches the Amazon S3 bucket, we could leave it as is and be done with this example, but in order to reduce costs of such a solution, we're going to use Amazon S3 lifecycle rules.

Lifecycle rules allow us to move older data to cheaper storage classes progressively and in an automated fashion. The reasoning behind this is, most recent auditing data is the most likely to be accessed, and older data should still be accessible, but we can live with it taking longer to get. This should be tweaked according to your use case.

## Building the infrastructure

### Using AWS CDK to deploy infrastructure

This post assumes you have AWS CDK Toolkit. You should have an AWS account created.

Amazon offers an Infrastructure-As-Code solution, called AWS Cloud Development Kit, or CDK for short. It uses AWS Cloudformation internally to define infrastructure in a reviewable, deployable manner. CDK is offered in multiple languages, we'll use Typescript in this example.

#### AWS CDK setup

Assuming you already have CDK Toolkit installed, create a folder for the CDK code and initialise the project:


```
mkdir audit-trail-cdk
cd audit-trail-cdk && cdk init app --language typescript  
```

cdk init app builds the initial scaffolding for the project. It creates a Stack, which will contain the pieces of infrastructure required. To finish up the setup, go to the generated code for the stack under bin/audit-trail-cdk.ts and uncomment the env: line and replace with your AWS account info:


```
// env: { account: '123456789012', region: 'us-east-1' }, 
```

Let's add the necessary pieces for building our infrastructure stack on lib/audit-trail-cdk-stack.ts:


```
import * as cdk from "aws-cdk-lib";
import { Duration } from "aws-cdk-lib";
import * as dynamodb from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-dynamodb";
import * as iam from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-iam";
import * as kinesis from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-kinesis";
import * as kinesisfirehose from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-kinesisfirehose";
import * as s3 from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-s3";
import { Construct } from "constructs";

export class SimpleAwsAuditTrailStack extends cdk.Stack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);

    const auditTrailStream = new kinesis.Stream(this, "Stream");

    new dynamodb.Table(this, "TableToAudit", {
      tableName: `TableToAudit`,
      partitionKey: {
        name: "partitionKey",
        type: dynamodb.AttributeType.STRING,
      },
      sortKey: {
        name: "sortKey",
        type: dynamodb.AttributeType.STRING,
      },
      kinesisStream: auditTrailStream,
    });

    const auditTrailBucket = new s3.Bucket(this, "AuditTrailDestination", {
      lifecycleRules: [
        {
          transitions: [
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.INFREQUENT_ACCESS,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(30),
            },
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.INTELLIGENT_TIERING,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(60),
            },
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.GLACIER,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(90),
            },
            {
              storageClass: s3.StorageClass.DEEP_ARCHIVE,
              transitionAfter: Duration.days(180),
            },
          ],
        },
      ],
    });

    const deliveryRole = new iam.Role(this, "deliveryRole", {
      assumedBy: new iam.ServicePrincipal("firehose.amazonaws.com"),
      inlinePolicies: {
        s3: new iam.PolicyDocument({
          statements: [
            new iam.PolicyStatement({
              resources: [
                `arn:aws:s3:::${auditTrailBucket.bucketName}`,
                `arn:aws:s3:::${auditTrailBucket.bucketName}/*`,
              ],
              actions: [
                "s3:AbortMultipartUpload",
                "s3:GetBucketLocation",
                "s3:GetObject",
                "s3:ListBucket",
                "s3:ListBucketMultipartUploads",
                "s3:PutObject",
              ],
            }),
          ],
        }),
        kinesis: new iam.PolicyDocument({
          statements: [
            new iam.PolicyStatement({
              resources: [auditTrailStream.streamArn],
              actions: [
                "kinesis:DescribeStream",
                "kinesis:GetShardIterator",
                "kinesis:GetRecords",
                "kinesis:ListShards",
              ],
            }),
          ],
        }),
        logs: new iam.PolicyDocument({
          statements: [
            new iam.PolicyStatement({
              resources: ["*"],
              actions: ["logs:PutLogEvents"],
            }),
          ],
        }),
      },
    });

    new kinesisfirehose.CfnDeliveryStream(this, "DeliveryStream", {
      deliveryStreamType: "KinesisStreamAsSource",
      kinesisStreamSourceConfiguration: {
        roleArn: deliveryRole.roleArn,
        kinesisStreamArn: auditTrailStream.streamArn,
      },
      s3DestinationConfiguration: {
        bucketArn: auditTrailBucket.bucketArn,
        roleArn: deliveryRole.roleArn,
      },
    });
  }
}
```

### Understanding the infrastructure code

The code tries to emulate the architecture diagram as much as possible, but let's go through it in more detail:
1. Create an AWS Kinesis Data Stream.
2. Create an Amazon DynamoDB table and add the AWS Kinesis Data Stream created in the previous step.
3. Create the Amazon S3 bucket, and define on it the lifecycle rules.
4. Create the AWS IAM role to be used by AWS Kinesis Firehose. The role needs to have permissions to retrieve data from the AWS Kinesis Data Stream, and to store data in the AWS S3 bucket.
5. Create the AWS Kinesis Firehose resource, with reference to the data stream and the S3 bucket.

## Testing the solution

Let's create a record in the Amazon DynamoDB and make a change, to see what the data in the AWS S3 bucket looks like.

```
aws dynamodb put-item  \
--table-name TableToAudit \
--item '{"partitionKey": {"S": "1"}, "sortKey": {"S": "State"}, "Data": {"S": "Initial state"}}'

aws dynamodb put-item  \
--table-name TableToAudit \
--item '{"partitionKey": {"S": "1"}, "sortKey": {"S": "State"}, "Data": {"S": "Changed state"}}'
```

At this point, the Amazon DynamoDB table should look like this:

![0481cd29-9829-4173-9dcf-744e568839ba.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/0481cd29_9829_4173_9dcf_744e568839ba_f89ce2951f.png)

Let's see what the data looks like on the Amazon S3 bucket, inside a file.

![fa79e3ec-9c1b-4008-b1a4-d7ce17bba922.png](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/9/10/fa79e3ec_9c1b_4008_b1a4_d7ce17bba922_9aac2f6b93.png)


```
{
  "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
  "eventID": "65eed7c0-4c74-4e71-b443-3b68b28f9455",
  "eventName": "INSERT",
  "userIdentity": null,
  "recordFormat": "application/json",
  "tableName": "TableToAudit",
  "dynamodb": {
    "ApproximateCreationDateTime": 1662992934392,
    "Keys": { "sortKey": { "S": "State" }, "partitionKey": { "S": "1" } },
    "NewImage": {
      "sortKey": { "S": "State" },
      "Data": { "S": "Initial state" },
      "partitionKey": { "S": "1" }
    },
    "SizeBytes": 67
  },
  "eventSource": "aws:dynamodb"
}
{
  "awsRegion": "us-east-1",
  "eventID": "55c911a3-d0a6-4d23-99ab-c1fd3e4d01b5",
  "eventName": "MODIFY",
  "userIdentity": null,
  "recordFormat": "application/json",
  "tableName": "TableToAudit",
  "dynamodb": {
    "ApproximateCreationDateTime": 1662992947714,
    "Keys": { "sortKey": { "S": "State" }, "partitionKey": { "S": "1" } },
    "NewImage": {
      "sortKey": { "S": "State" },
      "Data": { "S": "Changed state" },
      "partitionKey": { "S": "1" }
    },
    "OldImage": {
      "sortKey": { "S": "State" },
      "Data": { "S": "Initial state" },
      "partitionKey": { "S": "1" }
    },
    "SizeBytes": 109
  },
  "eventSource": "aws:dynamodb"
}
```

As you can see, there's data about each change in a [JSON Lines](https://jsonlines.org/{externalnofollow}) format, first the "INSERT", then the "MODIFY", where the modification has the "OldImage" and "NewImage". Data on changes is partitioned by default inside the bucket, with the smallest partition being on the hour of the day.

### How to query the data

In the past, one of the negative sides of storing this kind of data in Amazon S3 would be losing some flexibility: typically, you would have to get (download) the files that were relevant, and then do some data analytics on it. That is no longer the case. There's a nice feature in Amazon S3 where you can query the data in files directly, using a SQL-like language. For example, to get all audit records with partitionKey equal to "1":

```
aws s3api select-object-content \
--bucket BUCKET_NAME \
--key BUCKET_KEY \
--expression "select * from s3object as s where s.dynamodb.Keys.partitionKey.S = '1'" \
--expression-type 'SQL' \
--input-serialization '{"JSON": {"Type": "LINES"}}' \
--output-serialization '{"JSON": {}}' "output.json"
```

## Conclusion

In this blog post, a simple architecture to store audit trail from an Amazon DynamoDB table was presented. The data pipeline to export this data through AWS Kinesis was detailed, and information on how to query the final data was provided. Future improvements on this pattern include data preprocessing and scaling.

All code referenced in this blog post is available in [this repository](https://github.com/luiscrs14/simple-aws-audit-trail{externalnofollow}).

An article about audit trail solution with AWS Kinesis and S3 with a focus on simplicity and affordability

thumbnail_AWS_Kinesis_S3.png

AWS_Kinesis_S3.png

Simple and affordable audit trail solution with AWS Kinesis and S3

In this blog post, I propose an architecture using 2 AWS services, namely AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS, to achieve a notification pipeline using a webhook.

Before we dive into the solution, let's review the concepts we'll be using.

## What are Webhooks?

Webhooks offer a way to send real time notifications to clients. Opposite to traditional APIs, where a client requests data from a server, Webhooks allow a client as a consumer to subscribe to server events. After the initial registration, no more interaction is needed.

## What is Amazon SQS (Simple Queue Service)

[Amazon SQS](https://aws.amazon.com/sqs/{externalnofollow}) is message queuing service commonly used to decouple services: instead of having two or more services communicating synchronously, queues can be used to defer this communication asynchronously, allowing simpler scaling.

## What is AWS Lambda?

[AWS Lambda](https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/{externalnofollow}) is a serverless compute platform. This means it uses AWS compute infrastructure, but all the instance setup is managed by AWS: the customer is only responsible for the business logic. AWS Lambda uses Lambda functions, which are applications that are triggered by events.

## Proposed architecture

Here's a diagram describing the main components of the architecture. They will be discussed in more detail later.

![aws_sqs.svg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/aws_sqs_b5e200e356.svg)

## Setting up the listener

This post assumes you have [Node.js](https://docs.npmjs.com/downloading-and-installing-node-js-and-npm{externalnofollow}) installed, as well as [AWS CDK Toolkit](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/v2/guide/cli.html{externalnofollow}). You should have an AWS account created.

Let's start by creating the customer webhook endpoint. This will serve as a target to the notifications.

Create a new file app.js with the following code:

```
const http = require('http');

const port = 3000;

const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
    let body = '';
    req.on('data', chunk => {
        body += chunk.toString();
    });
    req.on('end', () => {
        console.log(body);
        res.end('ok');
    });
});

server.listen(port, () => {
    console.log(`Server running  on ${port}/`);
});
```

This is a simple listener that will wait for a request with a body, and will print the body contents to the console. We will use this to make sure we are getting our notifications, meaning the webhook is effectively working.

To start the listener, run:

```
node app.js
```

By default, the server will be running on localhost:3000. Since we need to communicate with our listener from AWS Lambda, we need to make this endpoint public. A really useful tool for this I often use is [ngrok](https://ngrok.com/{externalnofollow}), you can use it to create a public proxy to your local port (you’re free to use any other method you’re familiar with). After exposing the endpoint publicly, you should have a URL that is reachable from the Internet.

## Infrastructure

So we have a client endpoint waiting for notifications. Now we need the infrastructure to send the notifications.

Let's detail how each architecture component fits together.

### Components

#### Amazon SQS

In this particular use case, Amazon SQS is used as a source of events for the notifications. The server business logic is abstracted here, for simplicity purposes; in a real life scenario, a service would send events, which eventually reach an Amazon SQS queue. Here, we'll push messages directly to the queue to model this behaviour.

#### AWS Lambda

For this particular use case, the Lambda function will be invoked to consume messages from the SQS queue and, for each message, will send a notification to the customer webhook endpoint.

### Building the infrastructure

#### Using AWS CDK to deploy infrastructure

Amazon offers an _Infrastructure-As-Code_ solution, called [AWS Cloud Development Kit](https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/{externalnofollow}), or CDK for short. It uses [AWS Cloudformation](https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/{externalnofollow}) internally to define infrastructure in a reviewable, deployable manner. CDK is offered in multiple languages, we'll use Typescript in this example.

#### AWS CDK setup

Assuming you already have CDK Toolkit installed, create a folder for the CDK code and initialise the project:


```
mkdir notification-cdk
cd notification-cdk && cdk init app --language typescript
```

cdk init app builds some initial scaffolding for the project. It creates a Stack, which will contain the pieces of infrastructure required.

A final step for the setup is to go the generated code for the stack under bin/my-app-cdk.ts and uncomment the env: line and replace with your AWS account info:


```
// env: { account: '123456789012', region: 'us-east-1' },
```

Let's add the necessary pieces for building our infrastructure stack on 'lib/cdk-stack.ts'

```
import * as path from "path";
import * as cdk from "aws-cdk-lib";
import { Construct } from "constructs";
import * as sqs from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-sqs";
import * as lambda from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda";
import { SqsEventSource } from "aws-cdk-lib/aws-lambda-event-sources";

export class EcdevWebhookInfrastructureCdkStack extends cdk.Stack {
  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props);

    const queue = new sqs.Queue(this, "EventsQueue", {
      queueName: "EventsQueue",
    });

    const lambdaFunction = new lambda.Function(this, "EventHandler", {
      runtime: lambda.Runtime.NODEJS_16_X,
      handler: "index.handler",
      code: lambda.Code.fromAsset(path.join(__dirname, "lambda-handler")),
    });

    lambdaFunction.addEventSource(new SqsEventSource(queue));
  }
}
```

#### Code walkthrough

Let's go through the code to make sure everything is clear.

1.  Create an Amazon SQS queue.
2.  Create an AWS Lambda function, using a local folder as source.
3.  Set Amazon SQS queue as an event source for the function.

#### Edit code for AWS Lambda function

We'll use the CDK stack to include the Lambda function code, since it's a simple example.

In the root of the cdk project, run:

```
mkdir lambda-handler
touch lambda-handler/index.js
```

This creates a new folder and file where the AWS Lambda function code will live. Edit the file with the following code, replacing <LISTENER_URL>:

```
var http = require('https');

exports.handler = function (event, context) {
    event.Records.forEach(record => {
        const params = {
            host: "<LISTENER_URL>",
            body: record.body,
            method: "POST"
        }
        var post_req = http.request(params);

        post_req.write(record.body);
        post_req.end()
    })
}
```

What the lambda handler's code does is, for each event record (which will match an individual queue message), create a HTTP POST request and send it to the Listener endpoint that was setup earlier. Please note that the host mustn't include the protocol (http:// or https://).

#### Deploy the infrastructure

Now that we have the infrastructure ready to be deployed, let's execute the following command to do it:


```
cdk deploy
```

### Sending the message to Amazon SQS


```
aws sqs get-queue-url --queue-name EventsQueue

aws sqs send-message --queue-url 'QUEUE_URL' --message-body 'This is an important and time-critical message'
```

### Checking the notification is received

After sending the message to the Amazon SQS queue, if all went well, you should see the message in the client application console:

```
Server running  on 3000/
Received notification: This is an important and time-critical message
```

### Cleanup

To clear the infrastructure resources just created, you can use CDK Toolkit to destroy the stack. Simply run:

```
cdk destroy
```

## Conclusion

In this blog post, a simple architecture to use a webhook to send notifications to clients was presented. This shows the essential working blocks the solution. In real life scenarios, there are other concerns, such as security, reliability, cost, that are out of scope for this use case, but definitely crucial to a production service.

All code referenced in this blog post is available in the [listener](https://github.com/luiscrs14/ecdev-webhook-listener{externalnofollow}) and [cdk](https://github.com/luiscrs14/ecdev-webhook-infrastructure-cdk{externalnofollow}) repositories.


An article about using Amazon SQS and Lambda for Webhooks processing

thumbnail_blog_9.png

blog_9.png

Reliable Webhooks processing with AWS Lambda and Amazon SQS

Amount of businesses that failed due to poor web hosting is tremendous. You can make a stunning design, build a quality product, build your brand, and build a sales funnel, but if you take hosting lightly, it can ruin everything you did. Surprisingly, how many web hosting propositions are available across the web, and they all look so promising that you might think nothing could be better.

Web hosting is like a truck, which needs to be fast enough, reliable, and strong enough to carry heavy loads.

In this article, I will examine the following topics:
- What is the high availability on a website
- What are 3 types of web hosting commonly used for [WordPress](https://www.ecdevstudio.com/hire-wordpress-developers/)
- How to install AWS hosting for WordPress with preinstalled cPanel

## What is the high availability on a website

People usually say that website hosting availability is when the server is able to respond 99.9% of the time. I'd include a load resistance here too, otherwise it makes no sense if the server that is up 99.9% of the time goes down because of too many connections.

Below is a list of **key facilities (services) that help in better availability of the site:**
- Correct web hosting. More information about that I will write below.
- CDN service.
- Proper caching mechanism.
- Load balancer (rarely used for WordPress).

Of course, the WordPress website should be technically correct itself, otherwise no one hosting will help.

## What are 3 types of web hosting commonly used for WordPress

### Type 1. Shared hosting

In this type of web hosting, your website resides on a single server instance along with others, and all resources are shared among all sites hosted on that server.

Advantages of shared hosting:
- Low cost.
- Simplicity in use.

Disadvantages of shared hosting:
- You are restricted in traffic and bandwidth.
- Shared resources are not isolated. In the case of a traffic surge on one website, all others may go down for some period.
- A large number of websites are usually hosted on one server instance, about one hundred.
- You are limited in the number of websites you can host.

### Type 2. Managed WordPress hosting

This type of web hosting offers isolated system resources and a ready-to-use WordPress environment.

Advantages of managed WordPress hosting:
- Simplicity in use.
- Very quick site setup.
- Backup and staging options in a few clicks.

Disadvantages of managed WordPress hosting:
- You are restricted in traffic and bandwidth.
- You are restricted in the amount of hosted websites.
- You don't know the exact hardware resources you pay for. We think users significantly overpay for the allocated resources they have.
- Most of the managed WordPress hosting platforms have their global server-side cache to speed up hosted websites. It cannot be disabled, it cannot work together with other caching mechanisms, and in some cases, it can cause problems when developing user flows of higher complexity. In EcDev Studio we can make a custom caching configuration that provides a pretty higher speed increase than such a global cache. This is a primary reason why we don't recommend managed WordPress web hosting to any of our clients.

### Type 3. Cloud server

Before talking about cloud servers I want to mention such hosting types as **VPS (Virtual Private Server) and Dedicated Server**. They are advanced hosting types and they offer isolated resource allocation. When you purchase hosting, the initial configuration and launch of the server instance are handled by hosting company staff, and the hardware configuration is fixed. VPS and classic dedicated servers we consider outdated hosting types and I will not describe them in detail in this article.

The cloud is a network of connected hardware with the ability to quickly set up server instances, change their configuration on the fly, or destroy them. Unlike VPS and dedicated servers, with **cloud server instances** all the operations are performed without human staff involvement. For example, it is possible to change RAM, CPU, and SSD storage with just a few clicks without contacting customer support.

The cloud server is an advanced and recommended approach to hosting websites. There are such popular cloud server providers as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Heroku, and Digital Ocean. In EcDev Studio our preferred provider is AWS so in this article I will provide an in-detail guide on how to host a WordPress site on AWS without previous knowledge of cloud administration.

Advantages of cloud servers:
- Infrastructure is backed by a large company.
- Easy and fast setup in a few clicks.
- Relatively high overall performance and stability of the cloud server instance.
- You are able to choose the exact hardware resources you pay for.
- You can pay $30-$80 per month for the average resources and host an unlimited amount of websites. Of course, you should care if the allocated server resources are enough for your needs.

Disadvantages of cloud servers:
- Together with total freedom, it usually requires higher skills in order to administrate the server instances. Administration tasks can be simplified in case of using options with a preinstalled web panel like cPanel.
- You need to have basic Linux skills in order to connect to the server and check the disk usage, as well as RAM/CPU usage.

## How to install AWS hosting for WordPress with preinstalled cPanel

In this guide, we will launch the **AWS EC2** instance of class **t3.small**. AWS EC2 is an on-demand computing service based on the AWS cloud platform, that allows you to create server instances quickly and scale them as needed. The total approximate price in the **us-west-2** region (Oregon) is **$30.96 per month**. I say approximate because billing is calculated on an hourly basis. Later, you will be able to scale your server to a higher plan according to your needs based on the expected number of hosted websites, traffic, etc.

Here is what's inside the **t3.small** package:
- 2 X CPU Intel Xeon 3.1 GHz.
- 2 GB memory.
- 20 GB SSD disk space.

In this guide, I will show how to create a server with cPanel, however, in the real case, you will be able to use a free [CentOS Web Panel](https://centos-webpanel.com/{externalnofollow}) instead of a poplar cPanel, but in that case you'll need to manually install it on the server via SSH.
Below is a step-by-step instruction for setting up an AWS EC2 instance with preinstalled cPanel.

### Part 1. Creating EC2 instance

**Step 1.** Log in AWS console, and switch to the right region.

**Step 2.** Enter EC2 in the search, and click on the corresponding service.

![EC2 search](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/2_bfbce33d0f.png)

**Step 3.** Click on “Launch instance” and choose “Launch instance”

![Launch instance](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/3_7d5a7b0b7d.png)

**Step 4.** Set the server instance name, for example, "WordPress Web Server"

![server instance name](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/4_9fe85a0d7f.png)

**Step 5.** In the search enter “cPanel&WHM for Linux” and press Enter

![search cPanel&WHM for Linux](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/5_5fe33766d6.png)

**Step 6.** In the tab “AWS Marketplace AMIs” select “cPanel&WHM for Linux” By cPanel

![select cPanel&WHM for Linux](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/6_3e8f28727e.png)

**Step 7.** Click “Continue”

![Continue](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/7_5b3f47f5c3.png)

**Step 8.** Click “Confirm Changes”

![Confirm Changes](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/8_875f051892.png)

**Step 9.** Leave “t3.smal” in the Instance type field

![Leave t3.smal](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/9_b7c82c049b.png)

**Step 10.** Click on “Create new key pair” to create a new SSH key.

![Create new key pair](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/10_f69d291fda.png)

**Step 11.** Enter a key name and click ”Create key pair”. You should download the key pair and save it on a local computer. You need it to access the server instance via SSH.

![download the key pair](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/11_67a27ac4bf.png)

**Step 12.** Leave the default Network settings.

![Leave the default Network settings](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/12_bc2b58b976.png)

**Step 13.** For the storage, you can either leave the default 20Gb or make it higher.

![storage](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/13_5945a68fd5.png)

**Step 14.** Click “Launch instance”.

![Launch instance](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/14_956dec7938.png)

**Step 15.** Click “View all instances”.

![View all instances](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/15_98d4ca9bb7.png)

**Step 16.** Select the newly created server.

![Select the newly created server](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/16_284e78ccb8.png)

**Step 17.** Open the Security tab and click on the security group that is created by default. You will see the security group settings at the bottom.

![Security tab](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/17_41e1da3c0d.png)

**Step 18.** Add the following rules:
- 22 - for SSH access.
- 2083 - for cPanel access.
- 2087 - for WHM access.


It should be the same as in the screenshot below.

![rules](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/18_a0d2c8db5c.png)

**Step 19.** Click “Save rules”.

**Step 20.** Go to the Elastic IPs section.

![Elastic IPs section](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/20_47825dd666.png)

**Step 21.** Click “Allocate Elastic IP address”

![Allocate Elastic IP address](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/21_fff41c3779.png)

**Step 22.** Click “Add new tag”, add tag “Name”, and click “Allocate”

![Add new tag](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/22_9dac8484fe.png)

**Step 23.** Select the newly created IP address, copy the “Allocated IPv4 address” value, and save it locally (you will need it for further server access via SSH). Then click Actions >> Associate Elastic IP address.

![copy the Allocated IPv4 address](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/23_752a36f310.png)

**Step 24.** On the next screen choose the server and click “Associate”

![choose the server](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/24_007a944104.png)

We completed steps 20-24 to set the static IP address for the server. Otherwise, the IP address would change with every restart of a server instance.

### Part 2. Configuring cPanel

**Step 25.** Launch SSH terminal. If you use Windows OS it can be a Putty application.

**Step 26.** If you use a Linux-based OS you should grant the right permissions for the key. Use this command:\
chmod 600 {path_to_private_key}

The key pair you have downloaded at step 11.

**Step 27.** Connect to the server via SSH in order to get the URL for accessing WHM (Web Host Manager). Use this command if you use a Linux-based OS:\
ssh centos@{server_ip_address} -i {path_to_private_key}

**Step 28.** When you get the question “Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/[fingerprint])?“ you should type “yes” and press Enter.

![Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no/fingerprint)](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/28_2089d17ebf.png)

**Step 29.** Connect to WHM using the URL that you get in a terminal.

![Connect to WHM](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/29_59b7089302.png)

**Step 30.** The browser will show the SSL error “Your connection is not private”. You should click “Advanced” and then “Proceed”.

![ click Advanced and then Proceed](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/30_dcd14e13a7.png)

To get rid of a warning, the SSL certificate should be installed for your cPanel instance, there is a lot of available information about that in public access.

**Step 31.** Accept the terms of usage for access to WHM and cPanel.

![Accept the terms of usage](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/31_4fbd65c2f5.png)

**Step 32.** Click “Log in”

![Log in](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/32_9b310246c1.png)

**Step 33.** Create a new cPanel account or log in to your existing account.

![Create or log in](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/33_74157f7da5.png)

**Step 34.** Enter the email address for receiving service notifications and click “Finish”.

![Enter the email address](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/34_f8b05573d7.png)

**Step 35.** Set the root password. Click WHM >> Home >> Server Configuration >> Change Root Password

**Step 36.** Click WHM >> Home >> Networking Setup >> Change Hostname in order to change hostname. You can choose one from the list displayed on the right side.

![change hostname](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/36_5964b137ae.png)

### Part 3. Adding the domain

**Step 37.** Create WHM account. Click WHM >> Home >> Account Functions >> Create a New Account

![Create WHM account](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/37_06489da53c.png)

**Step 38.** Copy Name Servers from your WHM account and set them for your domain.

![Name Servers](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/38_b1505ec14e.png)

**Step 39.** Log in to cPanel. To do this you should go to WHM >> Home >> Account Information >> List Accounts, and click on the сPanel icon.

![Log in to cPanel](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/39_3ab93032a1.png)

**Step 40.** On the new page, you should choose WordPress.

![choose WordPress](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/40_9c9b76e439.png)

**Step 41.** Wait until WP installation finishes, and click on “Add content”.

![Wait until WP installation finishes](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/29/41_f13eb51bf4.png)

**Step 42.** You will be able to fully control WordPress on the opened page, log in as a WP-admin, etc.

![fully control](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/7/27/42_min_4af1669e5f.png)

## Сhoosing and configuring high availability WordPress hosting: Final Thoughts

There is a large room for improvement of the WordPress site and web hosting in order to achieve higher speed and availability. It is possible to use Docker container, setup automated deployment, move a database to the cloud and decouple it from the server instance, add CDN, make the headless architecture for WordPress, set up autoscaling, and make other improvements. Here in this article, I have covered just the basics, so users without much technical knowledge can start using the high-availability AWS cloud to host their WordPress websites.

In addition, consider [hiring WordPress developers](/hire-wordpress-developers/) if you need assistance with the development, optimization, maintenance, or infrastructure changes to your WordPress website.

Different types of web hostings listed, and a guide to configuring high availability WordPress hosting on AWS

thumbnail_Frame 68.png

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A guide to choosing and configuring high availability WordPress hosting

This article is not an attempt to describe project management theory from books. It rather enlists my key project management techniques and principles based on years of practice, pitfalls and pearls.

#### 1. The more risks identified at the planning stage the better

Apart from affecting budget resources and reputation, risks can even lead to project death. A carefully-selected project management technique will help you detect all the major risks at the early stages when you only start building a project model.

Imagine you are responsible for developing a high-load system that supports 5,000 users, but you don't have the right team member who can handle such complex projects. For sure, it is a risk as you might fail to find the right fit in time or a newcomer will fail you in the long run.

Or, let's say, you need to enable data synchronization between your data storage and a few other 3-rd party platforms. So what exactly needs to be done within this project scope? First of all, writing code that will do the necessary synchronization. But what about data integrity, big data support, automatic scaling, automatic process retrieval after the downtime, and finally finding the right tools and ways of testing all the above-mentioned project activities? Does this mean extra time estimates and the risks to be taken into account? For sure, yes. Will all the project managers consider it at the project initiation stage? From my experience, no. Yet, risk management is definitely one of those winning project management techniques that will help you create more accurate estimates as well as prevent unplanned scenarios and frustration. It's better to spend more time on program evaluation and review than later discover significant deviations from the agreed budget and timelines.

All the risk types can be checked here in this reliable [article](https://www.simplilearn.com/common-project-risks-article/{externalnofollow}), so I will not copy them. But please take them into account when estimating the scope of your next project and creating a project plan.

#### 2. Predict and prevent problems during development

When the development process is on and running, a few problems might evolve: a lack of understanding of how to implement an appropriate technical solution, repository mess, server configuration instability, no data backups, certain team-specific issues, such as low performance of one or multiple developers. That's especially true for more complex projects.

In such cases, the owner might fail to (or be unwilling to) discover these issues on the project. Or may know about them, but do nothing. Yet, it's for sure one of the best project management techniques to react to them in a timely manner. This will save dozens of hours and tons of effort in the long run.

Any working environment will only get healthier if you keep things organized. Everything that could possibly go wrong, will go wrong. So what's the point in ignoring the problems if they show up later anyway?

Lastly, even if you understand the customer requirements well despite hazy specifications, you cannot expect your project team to be on the same page as you are. To achieve the project goal, all the specifications must be well-detailed at the program evaluation and review stage during the team meetings so that any misunderstandings are resolved before they occur.

#### 3. Visualize progress to see the whole picture, use appropriate project management tools

On multiple projects, progress visual representation is an important project management technique that allows you to immediately see project progress, spot any dependent tasks and plan other important tasks. In a project management methodology, the most popular ways of visual representation are Kanban Board and Gantt chart. Some key details are provided below:

##### Kanban board

Kanban itself is a project management methodology with its own rules. It is well described in this [article](https://kanbanize.com/kanban-resources/getting-started/what-is-kanban/{externalnofollow}). I will talk about its visual aspect only, from the perspective of understanding the project workflow. In Kanban Boards, you have different statuses (columns) and a set of tasks in each column, which are moved from left to right systematically, upon changing statuses.

##### The key things you can see in Kanban Boards:
- It helps to create a detailed plan, make predictions, and conduct risk management by means of setting specific statuses for certain project tasks (e.g. Code review).
- Easier workflow health tracking. Another helpful project management technique lies in making sure one specific to-do column is not overloaded with tasks, while other columns contain fewer. Ensuring a balanced amount of tasks in each column leads to good workflow health and better work breakdown structure.
- Almost in every project management software, you will find user icons next to the tasks in a project board. They show people's involvement in a more visual way and thus project managers can spot task dependencies more efficiently (see picture below).

![ecdev kanban board.jpg](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/3/kanban_5688eb4374.jpg)

The huge benefit of Kanban Boards is that a project manager does not need to spend time on maintaining them throughout the entire project life cycle, unlike the Gantt Chart that I am describing below.

##### Gantt chart

In project management, you always need a reliable way of calculating the valid completion dates of specific manageable tasks within one project. A Gantt chart is an ideal solution. It is one of the oldest project management techniques that was originally used in the Waterfall technique, but now it can be easily used in Agile, let's say for visualizing sprints and project progress tracking.

![ecdev gantt chart](https://ecdev-cms-dev-ecdev-cms-ecdev-cms-bucket.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/uploads/2022/6/3/gant_88fc06d9f6.jpg)

For you as a project manager, the smartest advantage of Gantt charts is seeing the exact project timeline for any task. It might be really useful in identifying task dependencies and seeing how the project progresses. However, it requires spending additional resources on chart maintenance, as you have to constantly reestimate each task separately.

#### 4. Always be aware of priorities, approaches and current problems

Throughout the project life cycle, reconsider task priorities occasionally, discuss approaches with the team (regarding delivery strategy, server infrastructure, technologies, task dependencies, etc), assist the team in resolving current project problems, or make necessary allocations for any new project activities. This project management technique will help you avoid a bunch of common pitfalls that usually occur on a project.

#### 5. Split the responsibilities correctly to avoid demotivation among the team

If project managers assign more complex projects to a developer than his skills level allows him to accomplish at the moment, it is normal as it will contribute to his growth. But if all the tasks related to e.g. administration, automation or infrastructure are assigned to a web developer, then you should expect his demotivation about the job he is doing.

In project management, to ensure a balanced work breakdown structure, the above-listed types of tasks should be assigned to other team members, such as an IT administrator, DevOps expert and an infrastructure expert. In addition, it is always better to assign new employees (who you trust) to those smaller tasks than exploit your current team member. If there are no trusted people available, then the problem lies more in recruiting than project management. My recommendation is to start cultivating friendly relationships with experts in different fields. It is highly useful to always be able to have specific/untypical tasks done within a project schedule just because you have the right people at hand and can assign those smaller tasks to them. Even in extreme project management, it is always recommended to have someone qualified for non-typical tasks.

#### 6. React immediately in critical situations

Project managers should never hope for luck. If the problem occurred, it cannot be ignored or postponed for later. Technical problems can be resolved by lead developers or tech leads. However, everything related to organization problems, resources planning, task dependencies, decision making, etc., should be a subject of prompt intervention by the management staff who should be able to apply suitable project management techniques depending on the situation.

#### 7. Work with the budget carefully

When working on any project tasks, whether big or small, respect your client's budget and inform in advance if you feel that one task requires more resources than you estimated initially or if there are certain unplanned task dependencies. It is always a winning project management technique to agree on all the time estimates upfront with your client than "surprise" them later. Dividing the project into distinct phases and work packages is the most reliable evaluation and review technique that will help you plan resources more carefully.

To work with project budgets more accurately, a critical path method (CPM) can be used. It is useful for analysing and planning mid-to-high complexity projects. It allows you to determine which tasks are the most critical and how to schedule them in a way you can meet the deadline at minimum cost. These tasks are called critical because if they take longer, the entire project will take longer to complete. This is the reason why the critical path method is very helpful for project managers. With its help they can estimate project duration more accurately, spot any task dependencies, identify risks, create more realistic project schedules and thus budgets. Program evaluation and review is made easier, smoother and more accurate.

#### 8. Be a superhero project manager - grow your soft skills

To manage the project successfully and achieve smooth project completion, the importance of soft skills cannot be underestimated. I mean communication, empathy, stress-resistance, leadership, and others.

Let's say you have difficulty getting some precise details from the client. This is because he is either a non-technician at all, or just explaining some real case scenarios in a specific domain like fintech. However, you don't understand them, no matter how much research you put into that. Or your whole team overworks to demonstrate the best delivery they can, but the client complains that your work is slow anyway.

Skilled project managers should be able to resolve these and many other unique challenges in an elegant way, so that both parties are left happy with the result. By implementing tried and tested project management techniques that are proven to work, you will contribute to not just your current project's success, but will also get more confidence when working on each next project.

## An ideal project management technique - can one size fit all?

Being a good project manager is not just about following specific project management principles and rules. Very often, certain situations require immediate actions when you need to find a solution to some problems on the project. No matter which party caused this problem, the customer or the development team, it needs to be addressed. All the project managers at EcDevStudio are trained to serve as problem-solvers for the customer, not just an intermediary. Out of many project management techniques described above and even more, we never try to find a one-size-fits-all scenario. Each project is unique, so the project management principles and other approaches need to be selected accordingly.

In our team, even the choice of the most suitable project manager is made based on some project specifics: technologies to be used, UX focus, etc. Let's say, if the project needs to start with the design stage and the customer deeply relies on excellent UX, we will definitely assign it to a project manager who is a former [UI/UX designer](/hire-ui-ux-designers/). If you are looking for a team you would find comfortable to work with, contact us for free a consultation.

There are many ways to organize project management, but to increase the efficiency there are specific principles and techniques for that.

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