This is perhaps the toughest issue for all of us to acknowledge: The longer you are in the space, the more skills you have filled out on LinkedIn (or wherever you are tracking your career for HR reps to look at) but the skills you possess today are, by definition, a subset of the skills you will possess even a couple of months from now if you change roles. Note that I said “change roles,” not “change employers.” The fact is that we use an insane number of tools in the development, DevOps and operations environments, and we’re addicted to adding new ones (that might be a hint about part three of this series). Changing roles within a company can involve minor changes, or it can take you to a whole new environment where no one cares that you are a Java genius; they want to know how fast you can pick up Python and be truly productive. Or they nod at your talk of configuring servers and ask if you can do that with Ansible on containers. It’s just not as important anymore for most employees to have a specific skillset. That’s a major contributor to the problems I talked about in part one.
Of course, there are roles in IT that involve far less change. Email administration, for example, isn’t all that different from the way it has been since, well, forever. We have changed how/where the server is configured and many orgs have added SSO or multifactor authentication, creating new issues, but it’s all evolutionary. When NoSQL systems came out, it looked like a major change in DBA work, but it really wasn’t. Within a year, reality put SQL over top of NoSQL stores and DBAs kept chugging along.
But DevOps has impacted both development and operations in profound ways. We pretty much standardized on Java, with all of its warts, because it was object oriented, general purpose and could be compiled if needed. Though embedded largely stayed with C, there was no serious competition in the enterprise for Java and Java-like (.NET) languages. Knowing them meant you could do everything but real-time/embedded development jobs—and even some embedded work shifted to Java as prices for miniaturized compute power dropped.
But that changed. The inflection point was JavaScript, and from there, we went a little bit crazy. When JavaScript took off, full-stack developers needed to know one front-end and a couple of backend languages. Other languages still existed—the staying power of both Perl and PHP is somewhat surprising to me; they’re both good languages but have limitations. But still, no serious competition. But Node.js took JavaScript to the server, Ruby was popular for backends, Python came along for quick scripting … And now we have apps written in those and a dozen more languages floating around.
I chose languages to fit the whole story into a blog because they see less change than the operations side, where we’ve gone from annual big releases to rolling deployments updated frequently and all the support tools changed in the process. Infrastructure has changed, data stores have changed, mobility has changed, UI targets have changed—basically, it’s a chaotic mess.
And you’re in the heart of it, keeping the data flowing and the org running. It’s astounding, and you deserve more kudos than you’re likely getting. So approach hiring differently. Some orgs are already there, but skill-based hiring is still too prevalent. Hire broad technical knowledge and a desire to know more. As someone I know honestly said in a job interview once, “No, I never used it, but it is just another programming language. I’ll be productive in a week.” She got the job and delivered as promised. For all but those few corner-case roles, hire for potential and achievements and skills will follow.
Web development has changed a lot since DevOps first hit the scene. The languages used have shifted, where languages are used has shifted, the likely back-end hosting environment has changed – but DevOps has folded these issues in and just kept plugging along.
We’re going to approach this from two angles – what languages you’re likely to use, and what DevOps offers. This is not a “Best Billion Web Development Languages for 2021!” article; there are plenty of those out there, and you are more than welcome to read them. This is more about using these languages in a DevOps environment, which has become standard for web apps more than any other type of development.
We’ll start by observing that your web app is, more than likely, going to have at least three parts – HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This is not news to those of you doing it daily, but we’re just setting the bar, here. Other languages may be used to generate or populate any/all of the above, but, in the end, these three languages get sent to the browser, so will be part of the equation.
Backends add an incredible amount of complexity to this equation. I’ve done Ruby backends that did most of their work in C++ and Java; I’ve done pure Java backends that spit out the required three components; I’ve done Node backends that had very little actual HTML/JavaScript source code, but generated a ton of both – it’s all there. And the hosting environments for backends have changed. When DevOps started, most hosts were virtual machines (VMs) or hardware, whereas now we’re mostly running cloud instances or containers. Those backends have to be configured and managed, too, along with all of the dependencies that your application requires. When you think about it, we really have created quite a messy environment.
But DevOps has risen to this challenge.
I’ve long been an Atlassian fan, and find them to be a great tool for managing the agile side of DevOps. Add in Ansible, for the operations side, and you have a good thing going. I recently looked into GitLab, and GitOps – through GitLab – offers a compelling alternative to Atlassian’s offerings; more so since Atlassian made some rather unpopular changes right about the time I was wrapping up my look at GitLab.
The key is that Git holds all the code. By adding in the scripts to spin up those increasingly complex backends and secure the entire infrastructure, you get an “App in a (virtual) box.” No matter what DevOps toolchain you use, tying this in is simple, because it already works well with Git and associated tools.
Developers tend to care more about the development side of the equation (imagine that!), so let’s talk a bit about what’s going on out there.
PHP is hanging on solidly, with a bulk of applications and (perhaps more importantly) libraries to keep it in the running. PHP is one of the original “generate an HTML page” languages, and is slowly being displaced. It isn’t a bad choice for your web projects, but it isn’t the only – or at this point, the most popular – choice.
Java is still somewhat popular, and while it offers good support for web development, it is … heavy? Is that the word? It’s something for this type of development, and has ceded ground to other languages when it comes to pure-play web development. The skills are transferrable to other targets, so it is a good broad-use language. Like the other serious players in this space, there are web-centric libraries and frameworks that make Java hum. I’m a fan of Spring, but the options are pretty broad.
JavaScript wins this race today. It is used on both client and server, there are a ton of developers and DevOps people available who can be productive in JavaScript from day one, and it is increasingly used in other contexts – meaning skills could transfer to other projects. Like any language, there are trade-offs, but the portability aspect makes the trade-offs things that many are willing to work to overcome. Libraries and frameworks abound to make JS development faster and more dynamic. Personally, I like Node for server-side development, and Angular for clients that need more than straight HTML/CSS offers (probably because it’s the one I’ve used the most).
Python is definitely a contender in this space, as it is in most others today. With Django (or whatever your framework of choice), it functions well for web development, and its popularity has given it a host of support libraries to get things done. Developers are easy to find, and skills are broadly applicable, as Python is used in most areas of Dev and Ops at this point.
Windows aficionados are still using C#, and it does have good hooks into Microsoft DevOps tools, so any Microsoft shop should include it in evaluations. I’ve done C# on Azure for web apps, and for me it was … different, but not broken. In a Microsoft shop, C# will be familiar, and at this point, most developers are familiar with web clients, so merging the two is only a tiny bit of a learning curve, but not a major one.
Ruby does seem to have ceded its spot to Python. It is unlikely you’ll find a steady flow of ruby developers to fill those positions, but it is a highly intuitive language that you can train Java, and even Python developers in, if necessary. Ruby is well-supported for web development; indeed, it feels more natural using Ruby for web work than command line tools (at least to me, YMMV). There are web frameworks to make Ruby more intuitive in web development, and jRuby offers deep integration with Java to make use of already existing Java classes.
All in all, JavaScript should be the strong contender for a new project today, but any of these tools will serve the need. They are all well-supported, and DevOps tools start with integration to most of these languages. Do what’s best for your environment, and keep rocking it.
Empower your developers to use their preferred open source languages. We offer many open source languages and tools—including Git, R and Python—that allow any developer to harness the power of the mainframe without spending months learning new skills.
Git
Git is a version control system (VCS) for tracking changes in computer files and coordinating work on those files among multiple people. It is primarily used for software development, but it can be used to keep track of changes in any files. The z/OS port of git supports automatic tagging and conversion of text files between ISO8859-1 (ASCII) and IBM-1047 (EBCDIC) character encodings.
Bash
Bash is an sh-compatible shell that gives users a command-line interpreter through a traditional interface via text window and a script execution capability. It is the default shell on Linux and Mac OS X.
Bison
Bison is a programming utility for creating parsers. It’s commonly used in both build automation and build automation generation, and converts annotated context-free grammar into a C, C++ or Java parser. Bison is used by PHP, Bash, Ruby and many other languages and tools.
bzip2
bzip2 is a data compressor for single files (it is not a file archiver). It typically compresses files to within 10% to 15% of the best-available techniques of statistical compressors at rates approximately twice as fast at compression and six times faster at decompression. This version of bzip2 was not written to exploit z Systems architecture; Gzip may work best for these needs.
cURL
cURL is an open source tool that can transfer data to and from servers using one of the supported protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, TFTP, DICT, TELNET, LDAP or FILE). This tool can work without user interaction. cURL functionality includes proxy support, user authentication, FTP upload, HTTP post, SSL connections, cookies, file transfer, resume and more.
Diffutils
Diffutils is a package of several programs intended to find differences between files. The diff command, for example, shows exact line differences between two files.
Gzip
Gzip is a popular data compression/decompression program (our ported tools have been compressed using this utility). This version of Gzip has also been modified to exploit z/OS EDC compression hardware, if present on your system.
libssh2
libssh2 is a software library that allows developers to use the SSH-2 network protocol in an easy-to-use, self-contained package. This package only contains LIBSSH2 libraries intended for use by other programs or utilities.
m4
M4 is a general-purpose macro processor. Most users require M4 simply as a dependency of Autoconf or Bison, although the language is used in other contexts such as text template re-use, text editing and text-processing applications.
Make
Make controls the generation of program executables and other non-source files from the program’s source files. Make allows users to build, install and update packages without knowing the process details.
Mktemp
The mktemp utility takes a given filename template and overwrites a portion of it to create a unique filename. Mktemp also manages the creation of temporary files and directories that allow the user to avoid cleaning up files that are not needed permanently.
OpenSSL
OpenSSL is a software library used in applications that need to secure communications against eavesdropping or need to ascertain the identity of the party at the other end.
Pkg-Config
pkg-Config is a programming tool that assists with compiling applications and libraries. It helps you insert the correct compiler options on the command line without the need for hard-coding values on where to find glib (or other libraries).
Sed
sed (stream editor) is a utility for parsing and transforming text. It is typically used for extracting part of a file using pattern matching, or substituting multiple occurrences of a string within a file.
sudo
sudo is a command-line utility that allows admins to delegate authority, giving certain users the ability to run commands as a super-user or as another user, while providing an audit trail of the commands and their arguments.
Unzip
UnZip is an extraction utility for archives compressed in .zip format. Unzip is also compatible with PKZIP and PKUNZIP utilities for MS-DOS as well as Info-ZIP’s and supports bzip2 compression methods, as well.
Vim
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to make creating and changing any kind of text very efficient.
Zip
Zip is a compression and file packaging/archive utility. Zip puts one or more compressed files into a single ZIP archive, along with information about the files.
zlib
zlib is a general-purpose, lossless data compression library providing in-memory compression and decompression functions, including integrity checks of the uncompressed data.
As we close out 2020, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the five most popular articles of the year. Following is the second in our series of the Best of 2020.
As a novice developer, you may be thinking about learning a programming language and starting a fantastic career.
In fact, this question on Reddit inspired the whole article:
The thing is, programming languages represent certain philosophies of its authors and tailored to certain types of problems, i.e., there is no such thing as “the best programming language.”
In this article, I describe major programming languages according to its popularity, usage, demand and ease of learning.
There is market demand and a potential salary range for each language. These are linked to specific personal goals and prior programming experience.
What Questions Should You Ask Yourself Before Diving in?
What kind of projects do you want to work on? If career flexibility is a priority, then learning Python or C++ will allow you to work with different types of programming. If your passion is web development, learning JavaScript or PHP is a smart choice.
How much experience do you have? You won’t want to switch to an advanced programming language, such as Rust, if you don’t have previous programming experience. If you’re new to a language, you’ll want to start at a higher level and be intuitive.
What are your career goals? Do you want to become a freelancer, working for an existing company or work with a startup? Are you trying to be better in your current role?
If you plan to get a job in a large technology company, learn the programming languages they use, e.g., NASA, Google and Facebook use Python.
Many programming languages have similar syntax and qualities—so if you learn one of them, it will be easier for others. The more languages you know, the more flexibility you have in your career and development projects.
In the list below, we will look at the best and most popular programming languages for many of the most common uses, including web development, mobile development, game development and more.
Top Five Programming Languages to Start Your Career
Java
It is probably the best programming language if you are looking for a common language that will be useful in various situations. As for choosing a programming language to learn, there are many resources for people who are thinking about learning Java. Java was released in 1995, which makes it one of the oldest programming languages. It is used on a wide range of platforms and operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris.
That means there will always be jobs for Java developers, making it (perhaps) the best programming language to learn.
Research shows that Java developers can expect to earn between $80,000 and $130,000 per year. If you are thinking about learning your first programming language, think about taking an online course, for example, CodeGym. This course, which contains 40 levels of game-play classes, will teach you all the basics you need to know to start programming in Java. It’s easy to follow—even if you don’t have programming experience—and it is worth checking out.
It is also best used for back-end web development, mobile development and desktop applications.
JavaScript
This programming language works on several platforms. Therefore, it is ideal for websites that will be accessed through various devices and browsers. It is suitable for anyone who designs websites with effects, interactive features, animations and pop-ups—standard features on virtually any brand website these days. If you want to work in a creative environment and add more experience to the user, this is a coding language to learn.
JavaScript is the number one language on the web. The growth of frameworks such as jQuery, Angular and React JS has made JavaScript even more popular.
If you just can’t stay away from the internet, it’s better to learn JavaScript sooner than later. I consider this JavaScript Masterclass an excellent place to start. For cheaper alternatives see this list of free JavaScript courses.
It is also best used for front-end and back-end web development
Learning PHP
PHP—another old language, first appeared on the stage of programming around the same time as Java in 1995. It is a general-purpose language widely used for web development from the early days of the web.
Unlike other languages, which can be quite tricky to use with HTML, PHP can be built directly into the HTML code block. Start and finish instructions are used to enter and exit PHP, making it very easy to use. Although PHP is not as popular as Python or Java, it can be a suitable language to learn because of its simplicity. It is convenient for beginners and you can write your first scripts just a few hours after you start your PHP course.
Again, the popularity and wide use of PHP means that work opportunities are relatively easy to find. An average PHP developer can expect to earn around $80,000 per year. However, there is potential to make much more as a freelancer.
Take an advanced PHP course, which will teach you everything you need to know to find your first job as a programmer. It doesn’t matter if you’re studying your first language, or if you’re an experienced developer looking for the best programming language to add to your resume—PHP is a great choice!
Python is a useful step toward more advanced forms of programming languages. Python provides a high degree of website readability and is used by companies such as Reddit, Google and even NASA.
It is seen as entry-level programming that does not require too much prior knowledge. It may be ideal for relatively new professionals to help small businesses that want to expand their presence on the internet without having to resort to advanced professionals. Python is a relatively simple programming language that is very easy to pick up if you already have programming experience. That makes it one of the best to learn if you are already working as a developer and want to increase your resume quickly.
The code on Python is designed to be readable. It uses a lot of white spaces, which makes it a pretty easy language to learn while you’re studying it.
One of the most useful Python’s features is its compatibility with data analysis systems and scientific applications. It is a popular language in scientific communities and is often used by researchers to write their programs.
An average Python developer can expect to earn about $100,000 per year. However, there is little room for wage growth.
If you think Python is the best programming language to further your career, consider enrolling in a BitDegree course. The Python Basics Course includes everything you need to know to start writing programs on Python and contains less than four hours of lecture material.
It is best used for back-end web development, desktop applications, and data analysis.
C#
C# is another object-oriented, general-purpose language based on C. It is considered a suitable programming language for building applications native to Microsoft platforms. Microsoft initially developed it as part of its .NET framework for building Windows applications. C# uses a syntax similar to other languages such as C++. Therefore, it is easy to pick it up if you come from a different C family language.
C# is not only a suitable language for developing Microsoft applications, but also a language used by mobile device developers to build cross-platform applications on the Xamarin platform. Besides, anyone interested in VR development should think about learning C# as it is the recommended language for building 3D and 2D video games using the popular Unity game engine, which produces one-third of the best games on the market.
If mobile application development or virtual reality is your business, consider learning C#. Many mobile device developers use C# to create cross-platform applications on the Xamarin platform. Although it is not the most convenient programming language for beginners.
As was mentioned at the beginning, there is no best programming language to learn. The best language for you will depend on your experience, your current knowledge and reasons to learn a new language.
While there are many options, you should be able to narrow down your language choice by what you want to learn from it.
Remember to consider the following:
Programming experience, because some languages, such as Python and Java, are more suitable for beginners who have never programmed before.
What you want to do with the language. Different languages are used for different things.
How much time do you have? Some languages are much more demanding than others.
Make your choice based on your interests and the type of software development you want to get into. Here is a brief summary:
External web development: JavaScript.
Internal web development: JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP.
Mobile development: Java, C#.
Game development: C#.
Desktop applications: Java and Python.
To Sum Up
Programming and developer communities are evolving faster than ever.
Various new programming languages are emerging that are suitable for different categories of developers (beginners and experts) as well as for other applications (web applications, mobile applications, game development, distributed systems, etc.).
This list simply scratches the surface of existing programming languages. Still, the simple fact is that with the right coding skills, you will be perfectly prepared to offer valuable technical support and become an asset to any organization.
Most likely, you have heard about and Laravel, the open source PHP framework, and you might be planning to go to the next level to modernize your PHP Laravel application. AWS offers a number of features to help organizations scale to support millions of users, not to mention the agility and cost benefits associated with a cloud infrastructure. These features and capabilities are the compelling promoters to transform your application into a high-performing and resilient PHP Laravel application.
In this article, I will describe how to architect your software-as-a-service (SaaS) Laravel application with high-level scalability standards on AWS to help you understand what is required and discuss the considerations and action items to gain business value and resiliency. We chose the AWS cloud since is the most mature infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider and makes things easier to innovate; however, these practices can be applied to any cloud platform.
I also will explain why AWS is a vital option to scale and grow your SaaS Laravel application and present the current/future enterprise architecture. In part two of this series, I will discuss the importance of the 12-factor app methodology and multiple lessons to include in your strategy when architecting on AWS DevOps.
The Value of Migrating Your Laravel App to AWS
In an article I wrote for my company blog on running the digital transformation on AWS for your enterprise or web application, I explained the business benefits that brings the AWS cloud adoption, including a reduced IT labor force, pre-configured services to achieve faster implementations and minimal downtime, due to the repeatable and flexible infrastructure. The cloud is an essential environment to scale SaaS Laravel applications—in there, you can decouple your architecture into multiple service pieces, including cloud storage (Amazon S3 and CDN) and automatic scaling EC2 instances (AWS Auto Scaling), and integrate various SaaS/platform-as-a-service (PaaS) AWS components for your modern, cloud-native application. Also, if you are planning to move to the AWS cloud, you could use this AWS Migration Checklist to prepare for your journey.
“Web Applications and enterprises need to transform, they need to transform to a continuous transformation, and the cloud is the key.”
– Stephen Orban
I really enjoyed this phrase from AWS’ Stephen Orban, because you’re not only transforming your application; once on board the AWS cloud, you are in an infinite journey of continuous innovation: pay-as-you-go, microservices, serverless and so on.
Laravel Architecture on Docker and Microservices
Throughout the AWS cloud journey, there have been multiple disruptive evolutions, and one of them is the microservices, although, I won’t cover the microservices (Docker) approach. As a first step to transforming your application toward a cloud-native application, start with a monolithic approach. As your application matures and user base increases, I suggest jumping into a Laravel microservice approach, i.e., dockerize your Laravel PHP product using Docker, AWS ECS, Kubernetes or AWS Fargate. I’ve found many digital agencies that are adopting the AWS Cloud and DevOps practices with Docker/Serverless strategies and are getting overwhelmed with these sophisticated technologies, which has led to project failure because they were not ready to this stage.
Here’s how to avoid that: Grow gradually.
However, if your Dev team has enough experience with Docker and microservices, I wouldn’t hesitate to architect with microservices. This will be covered in the next article in this series, “Microservices with Laravel, Docker and AWS ECS.”
Who is This Article For?
Whether you are kicking off an MVP app on Godaddy/Hostgator, deploying Laravel on AWS with basic principles or ready to jump from hundreds of users into million users, this article is for you and will help you in your Laravel architecture on AWS.
Laravel for Large-Scale SaaS Architecture on AWS
So, let’s start by making clear what do you most need to scale a Laravel application on AWS.
The diagram below illustrates how a next-generation Laravel application should be architected with the full range of AWS DevOps components. Each piece mentioned in this AWS stack is highly elastic, scalable and resilient.
AWS Laravel Architecture Diagram
AWS Auto Scaling and Load Balancing
Initially, the dynamic traffic comes from AWS Route53, which will route all requests to the Application Load Balancing, which the AWS ALB will load balance across a fleet of EC2 instances ( 2…N Instances). This fleet should “scale” horizontally according to the traffic demands or the AWS CloudWatch metrics.
Amazon S3 and CloudFront CDN
All static content including images, videos and HTML will be hosted on Amazon S3, the cloud storage with infinite storage and elasticity. In front of Amazon S3, we will compound AWS CloudFront to cache the entire static content and reduce bandwidth costs. Integrating this pair of components is crucial.
AWS RDS Aurora (Managed Database Services)
The database data should be placed on AWS Aurora or RDS and AWS ElastiCache (Redis) for session management and cache user data. These AWS components are elastic and scalable, which helps to design the AWS Well-Architected framework with the highest fault-tolerance and resiliency.
Amazon VPC and Networking
In the AWS Networking level, we propose AWS VPC with a public/private enterprise network. Following PCI and HIPAA practices, there should be a VPN encapsulating the Laravel application within the private AWS enterprise network. Also included should be an AWS VPN connection and OpenVPN service to access the private network to your multiple Laravel environments.
Route53
From the DNS perspective, Route53 is needed to manage the application domain, DNS scalability, routing latency and more features to reduce failures.
AWS Lambda
This serverless component will be used for async jobs and backend scripts to minimize load in your AWS Auto Scaling cluster.
We will explore these AWS components substantially in detail, later in the third article of this series.
Web applications that can fit within this architecture:
API Laravel applications
Mobile backend applications
Laravel enterprise applications: CRMs, ERPs and back-office systems
SaaS Laravel applications
Front-end applications. i.e., Angular, React, Vue.js or any HTML site
ANY web platform: Python, Node.js, Ruby, PHP, Zend, CakePHP, Yii and Symfony
A word of warning: Don’t use Cpanel for any web application. It is not recommended to scale as it can slow down your application performance.
