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  • What DevOps Teams Need to Know About Responsive Web Design

    What DevOps Teams Need to Know About Responsive Web Design

    The role of DevOps in modern software development extends beyond just coding, testing and deployment. One of the significant areas where DevOps teams can bring value is delivering a positive user experience, a critical competitive advantage in the digital era. Responsive web design (RWD) is a cornerstone of a friendly user experience, allowing for seamless website functionality across various screen sizes and devices. 

    This article explores RWD and its fundamental principles and explains how RWD impacts web application development and deployment. We will review critical considerations for DevOps teams such as performance optimization across devices, the integration of responsive design into CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, the importance of a user-centric approach and consistent monitoring and troubleshooting. The objective is to equip DevOps teams with the necessary knowledge to effectively implement and support RWD, enhancing the user experience and significantly improving overall user satisfaction and engagement.

    What is Responsive Web Design?

    Responsive Web Design is a web development approach that makes your website layout adjust according to the size of the viewer’s screen. This means that your website looks and functions optimally on a wide range of devices, from desktop computers to tablets and smartphones. The primary goal of RWD is to ensure that users have an efficient and enjoyable experience, regardless of the device they are using.

    With the increasing use of mobile devices for internet access, it is essential that your website is accessible and user-friendly on all platforms. By implementing RWD, your organization can ensure that your website offers a seamless user experience, no matter the device.

    RWD removes the need for creating different versions of your website for different devices. Instead, you can have a single website that adjusts automatically to fit any screen size. This not only improves user experience but also saves you time and resources in website development and maintenance.

    Understanding the Principles of Responsive Web Design

    Fluid Grid Layouts

    A fluid grid layout is a key principle of RWD. It involves designing your website layout in relative units, such as percentages, instead of absolute units like pixels. This allows your website layout to resize dynamically to fit the screen on which it is viewed.

    The advantage of fluid grid layouts is that they offer more flexibility than fixed layouts. They allow your website to adjust smoothly to different screen sizes, ensuring that the user experience is not compromised. This is particularly important in today’s digital landscape, where users access websites from a wide range of devices with different screen sizes.

    Flexible Images and Media

    The second principle of RWD is responsive images and media. This means that your images and media files should be able to resize automatically to fit the screen size. This is essential to ensure that your images and media do not distort or overflow when viewed on smaller screens.

    Flexible images and media enhance the visual appeal of your website on different devices. They also improve the loading speed of your website, which is a crucial factor for user experience and search engine ranking.

    Mobile-First Design Philosophy

    Mobile-first design philosophy is another key principle of RWD. As the name suggests, this approach involves designing your website primarily for mobile devices and scaling it up for larger screens.

    The mobile-first design philosophy is based on the reality that a growing number of users are accessing the internet through their mobile devices. By designing your website with a mobile-first approach, you can ensure an optimal user experience on mobile devices.

    Progressive Enhancement

    Progressive enhancement is the fourth principle of RWD. It involves building your website in layers, starting with a basic layer that works on all devices and then adding more features and functionalities for devices with advanced capabilities.

    Progressive enhancement allows you to provide a basic, functional website for all users regardless of their device or browser. At the same time, it enables you to offer an enhanced website experience for users with modern devices and browsers.

    How RWD Affects Application Development and Deployment

    Responsive web design has a significant impact on the development and deployment of web applications. It affects various aspects of the process, including the codebase, development and testing process, user interface design and deployment and updates.

    Unified Codebase

    One of the main benefits of RWD is that it allows you to maintain a unified codebase. Instead of creating separate versions of your application for different devices, you can have a single codebase that works across all platforms.

    A unified codebase simplifies the development and maintenance process. It eliminates the need for duplicate coding and testing, saving you time and resources. It also ensures consistency in your application, as all users are accessing the same codebase, regardless of their device.

    Development and Testing Process

    RWD also influences the development and testing process. Since your application needs to work optimally on various devices and screen sizes, you need to incorporate responsive design considerations into your development and testing process.

    Responsive design testing involves checking your application on different devices and screen sizes to ensure that it functions and displays correctly. This can be done manually, using device emulators or through automated testing tools.

    User Interface Design

    The user interface (UI) design of your application is also affected by RWD. A responsive UI design ensures your application is easy to use and visually appealing on all devices.

    Responsive UI design involves creating a flexible layout that adjusts automatically to the screen size. It also requires you to design intuitive navigation and interaction elements that work well on touchscreens and desktop interfaces.

    Deployment and Updates

    Finally, RWD has implications for the deployment and updates of your application. With a responsive application, you can deploy and update a single version of your application for all devices.

    This simplifies the deployment and update process and ensures that all users have access to the latest version of your application. It also makes it easier to fix bugs and issues, as you only need to update a single codebase.

    Key Considerations for DevOps Teams

    Implementing RWD is not a straightforward task. It requires careful planning and consideration. Here are some key considerations for DevOps teams when implementing RWD.

    Ensuring Website Performance Across Different Devices

    One of the main challenges in implementing RWD is ensuring that your website performs well on all devices. This requires careful optimization of your website elements, including images, CSS and JavaScript.

    You also need to consider factors like loading speed and responsiveness, as these can significantly affect user experience. There are a number of available tools to help you analyze and optimize your website performance.

    Incorporating Responsive Design into CI/CD

    Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are key practices in DevOps. CI/CD involves integrating code changes regularly and delivering updates to users quickly and reliably. Incorporating responsive design in your CI/CD process can help you ensure that your application is responsive and user-friendly at all times.

    Automation in Testing

    Testing is a crucial part of the development process. With RWD, testing becomes more complex as your application needs to work on a wide range of devices and screen sizes. Automation can help streamline the testing process and ensure that your application is tested thoroughly and efficiently.

    User-Centric Approach

    A user-centric approach is essential in implementing RWD. This means considering the needs and preferences of your users at every stage of the development process. From the design phase to testing and deployment, the user experience should be at the forefront of your considerations.

    Monitoring and Troubleshooting Responsive Design Issues

    Finally, monitoring and troubleshooting are important aspects of implementing RWD. You need to monitor your website performance on different devices and troubleshoot any responsive design issues that arise.

    Analytics tools can provide valuable insights into how your website is performing on different devices. They can also help you identify and fix any issues that are affecting your website’s responsiveness.

    Conclusion

    In conclusion, responsive web design is an essential aspect of modern web development. It ensures your website is accessible and user-friendly on all devices, improving user experience and engagement. By understanding the principles of RWD and considering the key aspects of implementing it, you can unlock the power of responsive design and take your website to the next level.

  • Catchpoint Enables Experimentation by Automating Web App Testing

    Catchpoint Enables Experimentation by Automating Web App Testing

    Catchpoint this week expanded its open source WebPageTest performance testing suite of tools to enable IT teams to run instant tests that surface suggestions for improving overall web application and site performance.

    In addition, Catchpoint is now providing support for private tests, bulk tests and priority testing capabilities within the WebPageTest tool suite.

    Tim Kadlec, director of engineering for WebPageTest, said the goal is to make it easier for both developers and DevOps teams to experiment with how changes to applications and websites could improve performance using a capability that has now been added to the core suite.

    Identifying opportunities to improve performance typically requires tediously constructing manual tests over a period of weeks, noted Kadlec. Much of that effort is experimental in the sense that no one knows for sure if the tests being constructed will have a material impact on performance.

    The Opportunities and Experiments capability provides teams with a low-code tool for building tests based on a set of best practices that Catchpoint has defined. That approach makes it simpler to automatically generate and test tweaks that, for example, eliminate blocking scripts, optimize image rendering and minimize layout shifts. The result is optimization tests that show how their applications and websites could benefit from specific, actionable improvements without having to change any of the code that has already been deployed, said Kadlec.

    That’s a critical capability because it will encourage a level of experimentation that previously IT teams shied away from, simply because the amount of effort required to achieve an uncertain outcome was too high.

    It’s not precisely clear who is conducting these types of tests, as more responsibility for testing applications continues to shift left toward developers. The latest additions to WebPageTest make it easier for developers to conduct those tests without necessarily requiring help from a DevOps team, noted Kadlec.

    While there has always been a tremendous amount of focus on web application and site performance, the attention level has risen across organizations in the digital business transformation era. Many of the processes being implemented via web applications are extremely latency-sensitive. As more of those applications become routinely tested, the overall level of application performance should steadily improve.

    At the same time, the number of web applications and websites that most organizations are supporting also continues to expand. Most of those organizations are looking for ways to test applications without necessarily having to expand the size of the testing team or significantly increase the amount of time spent on testing.

    Regardless of the approach, it is apparent that testing is becoming more automated. The goal is not so much to eliminate the need for dedicated testing teams, but reduce the number of rote tasks that contribute to test avoidance in the interest of saving time. In theory, the more tests run—and the earlier they are run—the fewer issues that DevOps teams will need to deal with later.

  • Netlify Acquires OneGraph to Integrate GraphQL APIs

    Netlify Acquires OneGraph to Integrate GraphQL APIs

    Netlify this week announced it has acquired OneGraph, a provider of a platform that simplifies the integration and management of application programming interfaces (APIs) based on the GraphQL query language.

    At the same time, the company is committing $1 million to sponsor open source projects and setting aside $10 million for a Netlify Jamstack Innovation Fund that will help drive the development of emerging technologies. Those technologies will be consumed via the platform the company created based on Javascript, APIs and a markup language (referred to as Jamstack) to accelerate web application and website development. Rather than becoming investors in those companies, Netlify intends to make those funds available to advance the development of technologies that benefit the overall community.

    Fresh from raising an additional $105 million in funding, Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann said Netlify is committed to an ecosystem through which developers will be able to consume a wider range of services via both REST and GraphQL-based APIs. OneGraph will provide the core foundation for adding support for GraphQL to the Netlify platform, he noted.

    Overall, Netlify is trying to reduce the friction that developers encounter building web applications and the sites they run on, added Biilmann. That’s becoming especially critical as developers increasingly build microservices-based applications that invoke APIs to consume backend services that are made available via the Netlify platform, he added.

    Earlier this year, the company made available Netlify Build Plugins that provide DevOps teams with a set of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflows for building websites and web applications. Designed to be launched from within a Netlify platform, those plugin makes it possible to build a web application or website that can be launched directly from within a Git repository.

    The overall Jamstack philosophy enables DevOps teams to separate the development of frontends and backends of websites and applications. That approach is agnostic as far as any specific JavaScript framework is concerned, but it does define a way to automate the build process for a web application or website.

    A recent survey of more than 3,000 Jamstack developers published by Netlify finds one-third of survey respondents have worked on sites serving millions of users over the last year. Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents (62%) work outside the tech industry, including in advertising and marketing (21%), media and publishing (14%), education (14%), financial services (13%) and business support and logistics (13%). Well over a third (38%) work for a technology company. About a quarter (26%) have more than 10 years of experience. Top Jamstack benefits cited by all types of developers are performance, uptime, speed of development, security, compliance and avoiding vendor lock-in, the survey found.

    Jamstack is, of course, not the only framework for building web applications and the sites they run on. DevOps teams are increasingly being tasked with building a much wider range of external applications to drive digital transformation initiatives that are typically built using some type of JavaScript framework. The next big DevOps challenge, of course, is that as the number of applications being built continues to increase, so does the number of applications that need to be maintained and continuously updated.

  • Browser Isolation: Staying in Front of Internet-Borne Attacks

    Browser Isolation: Staying in Front of Internet-Borne Attacks

    Secure Remote Browsing Offers New Approach to Thwart Ever-Changing Cyberthreats

    Cybersecurity is a moving target, requiring constant vigilance to counter the cat-and-mouse tactics of malicious agents. Because enterprises are only as strong as the weakest link in their protection against internet threats, phishing schemes and rogue email attachments, proactive and defensive activities are essential.

    Each day new variations of internet-borne threats are contrived, making cyberdefense a tough challenge—especially as organizations increasingly rely on the web and browser-based applications for business-critical processes. In just a three-month period last year, 18 million malware samples were detected, as reported by PandaLabs—an average of 200,000 new threats every day.

    Unfortunately, it is not a matter of if but when you may be a target of a malware or ransomware attack. Digital evil lurks behind every click, and existing security frameworks no longer are effective. A new mindset and tools are needed to isolate cyberattacks, and prevent them from penetrating networks and devices before they can wreak havoc.

    Defense-in-Depth Strategy

    When establishing a cybersecurity strategy to defend against browser-based threats, it is important to assess the best approach for minimizing risk with finite resources.

    Maintaining a balance between performance and security is important. Implementing security measures that are too restrictive can degrade the user experience and reduce productivity. Being too lenient can leave the door wide open, increasing organizational vulnerability to a breach.

    All it takes is one employee who unknowingly clicks on a malicious link or downloads an infected file to put an entire organization at significant financial risk. According to a study conducted by IBM, the global average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million.

    In addition to existing security technologies, such as firewalls, antivirus programs, anti-malware systems, proxies and web-filtering solutions, a multilayered approach also must include remote containers and browser isolation.

    The Emergence of Secure Remote Browsing

    Secure remote browsing has been identified as a top technology in 2017 by Gartner. Otherwise known as remote browser isolation (RBI), this technology is rising in importance as a new method to strongly enhance web security and endpoint protection. Implemented in conjunction with existing security frameworks, it serves as an added measure of protection that eliminates enterprise threats without compromising the user experience.

    Browser isolation serves as an effective solution for addressing the human element that is responsible for triggering so many browser-borne threats. It provides a fully interactive, native user experience while ensuring that potential malware never reaches the endpoint. Utilizing secure remote browsing, users can browse the internet as they normally do without noticing any latency or other telltale signs.

    Remote browser isolation technology delivers unparalleled levels of security. To neutralize the great risk of encountering rogue links or corrupt files, a remote virtual browser isolates actual web browsing from the endpoint device. A newly created container is allocated within a remote “safe zone” for every remote browsing session and tab, disposing of the container once the user exits the session or tab.

    Once a browsing session is complete or inactive, the container is discarded along with any potential malware that may have accumulated during the browsing session. There is no performance degradation or noticeable latency that occurs during this process. Enterprises have the flexibility to utilize any HTML5-based browser on any operating system or device.

    While not all remote browser isolation solutions are clientless, those that are enable organizations to minimize the IT overhead and complexity associated with ongoing updates and endpoint installs, on which antivirus and other security solutions depend to block cyberthreats from reaching end-user devices.

    Browser isolation effectively augments existing web security frameworks, serving as a lead security measure that adds measurable power to existing IT investments, with minimal operational demands.

    About the Author / Daniel Miller

    Daniel Miller is the Director of Product Marketing at Ericom Software. He has more than 15 years of industry experience in corporate and product marketing, business development, and product management, supporting an array of technology services, hardware and software solutions—with a strong focus on cybersecurity in recent years. He frequently shares his insights on cybersecurity at industry conferences and podcasts, and regularly contributes articles to enterprise security publications. Daniel holds graduate degrees in Behavioral Sciences and Business Administration.