In today’s world people still argue about what or who DevOps is. Some may say it is a person who writes CI/CD or manages cloud infrastructure, others claim that it is a culture and knowledge-sharing attitude. If you are reading this post, you most probably have your own opinion on that matter. There probably isn’t a single “right” answer to the question. Whichever way you understand “DevOps”, you need to use some specific tools, and in this article I’ll share some insights on how we handle our processes at Netguru. I could have just listed all common DevOps tools, but there are plenty of articles about that on the Internet, so let me focus on Netguru's way of using 5 selected tools. As a tasty starter let me tell you that some of those were developed internally! 

When you build a great product it will eventually attract more and more users who will expect performance and availability. As the app grows and over time it handles more requests per minute. If you’re not prepared for this, app performance will drop and you will potentially lose your audience.  This article will show you what to pay attention to when building a scalable app.

It’s amazing what happens when you ask a question 🔥 We asked businesses to share the biggest challenges with site migration – let me tell you, it’s a crazy mix of situations with some very real truths... And that’s what we want to talk about. The Public Cloud has opened up amazing possibilities. And it is changing the types of challenges businesses encounter. So, without further ado, let's see what they had to say:  

How can you avoid the headache of having multiple heavy features or services on your web app? You may add more resources or refactor, or perhaps pile up on external services – but that doesn't help when users come back with more requests for new features.  We look at how combining Node.js with Lambda AWS and Serverless can solve some of these problems. 

Most web applications are fundamentally similar – they get input from users then process and store it. The end result usually shows the processed input to users in the form of an output. These applications are usually called CRUDs – this means that the infrastructure (the core components that work together) needed to support a typical product can stay almost the same for most startups. This article will show you the core components and how to design your infrastructure in a way that it is efficient, scalable and cost-effective.

Reliability, performance and security are huge factors to consider when developing a product online.  They can determine the success or failure of your app – what good is all that app development just for it to get knocked offline? With challenges growing in complexity software development brings with it new demands.  What is an SRE and what value do they bring to a software development project? 

At some point, you will have to decide where to host your amazing RoR application. Choosing between dozens of excellent hosting providers might not be so easy as each provider has its own trade-offs in terms of price, deployment / configuration flexibility, and scalability to name a few. To make your choice easier, we have compared five major RoR hosting providers – depending on your application requirements and budget you can make the right choice about where to host your application. 

Serverless computing is a hot topic in software architecture – but is it just another overhyped tech-buzzword?  Or maybe this newcomer in the IT world is bringing with it a world of change. In this article we explain ‘serverless’ and answer the most important questions:

Have you ever wondered what is behind the success of a car assembly line? How they manage to optimise work and minimise waste, operating only on what brings value?

Can a single mistake of a software developer ruin an entire company? The answer is yes, but only if the software development company doesn’t know how to learn from its past mistakes and grow as an organisation.

Recently, the trend for “serverless” started gaining a lot of traction both among developers and business people. As you’re reading this, you might be wondering, what on Earth does the new buzzword, serverless, even mean.

Invented by the founders of Trello, Glitch is said to be the friendly community where you can build a web app of your dreams. It holds out the promise of revolution in the way we develop software. The idea behind it is to give developers a hospitable and free environment to code, create apps, remix and modify them without a bulk of unnecessary coding tools that raise barriers to your creativity. With Glitch developers can create apps with ease and instantly deploy them. The platform is fairly new, with not so many users who have tested it so far, so we decided to give it a go and see how it delivers on its promises.

Quite recently, we've figured out that we can improve our internal flow in terms of answering clients' calls, coming primarily from abroad. The idea was to build a simple app that will intercept incoming calls, post a Slack notification and allow us to answer these calls through a web browser using Twilio number. That’s how Callio was born. In this article, you will find a comprehensive guide on how it works and how to integrate it with your account.

Does using docker to reduce disk clutter and time spent on setting up a new machine sound good? It definitely did to me. In this article, I’ll show you how to get started with a dockerized development environment, so you can get a taste of what it’s like. I’ll also give you some suggestions near the end on how to learn what you need to know about this tool.

GraphQL is a fairly new technology that will let you adjust your data requirements on the fly and increase the efficiency of your app while keeping your current stack.

Managing Amazon Web Services is hard, let’s face it. AWS is complex, offers numerous amount of services & APIs, it’s constantly changing, web console UX is bad and some concepts behind it are just hard to understand at the beginning. But once you start getting it, you also realize that it has a great power. The power not only to store unlimited amounts of data, handle millions of requests per second or even to predict your next partner using Machine Learning but also the power to literally clean your wallet in couple of seconds. It may be because of your lack of understanding of this system, because of a „miss click” or simply because you didn’t care to secure your account properly. Internet is full of stories like that. In this guide I’ll try to show you some “quick wins” which should decrease the probability of those events taking place.

Ever since its initial release – way back in 2009, would you believe – Node.js has been attracting the attention of developers the world over. And for a good reason. Written in JavaScript, this open-source, cross-platform environment makes Node.js a stand-out choice for real-time applications.

In Netguru, we like to work with different technologies to create advanced web applications. This time, we would like to put the spotlight on Node.js, a JavaScript runtime that our apps use as backend. It proved to be an efficient solution for real-time applications or the cases when a fast and scalable environment was required.

As Ruby on Rails developers, we have used AWS for a long time at Netguru. Amazon’s services such as S3, EC2 or RDS made our work not only easier and more convenient but also increased the security of many projects. A few months ago, during re:Invent 2016, which took place in Las Vegas, Amazon launched a new service, and we think we are all going to fall in love with it. The new service is AWS Lightsail.

Yesterday, some of us, developers, were hit hard by the AWS outage. Many websites went down for a few of hours, some of us couldn’t even continue working on your projects due to the outages of services like CircleCI.