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George Batschinski

How to optimize your AWS costs? 10 ways to reduce your AWS bill

How to optimize your AWS costs? 10 ways to reduce your AWS bill

Back4App is a heavy Amazon Web Services user and we run most of our infrastructure on this cloud provider. We will show you how we delivered $500,000 in yearly Amazon Web Services savings. Software development companies, startups, and enterprises can benefit from this article because:

  • It provides effective and proved ways to reduce AWS spending;
  • We show how to have short-term and low hanging fruit gains;
  • Most of the procedures are simple and demand only planning and hard work.

The actions described in this article are based on our own experience managing cloud infrastructure and translated in successful cost reductions. Here is a brief checklist of what you will find reading this report.


Alysson Melo

How Software Development Agencies can become more efficient

The challenges of making software are so varied. It is an empirical process, non-replicable, and sometimes unpredictable with constant changes. Small-Medium Size Software agencies (< 50 Developers) not only wholeheartedly feel these problems, they will constantly find further conundrums of standing out from competitors who are either “more experienced” in taking on enterprise-only projects starting from 100K, or “more extensive” for including a “full package” of UX / UI design, marketing strategy and more for all web, mobile, IoT and gaming needs.


Alysson Melo

Admin App updates: Custom Layout and All datatypes

Admin App updates: Custom Layout and All datatypes

In the last few weeks, we launched an excellent, robust feature called Admin App for our users and also upgraded its capabilities to a great extent so as to amplify the productivity, competence, and readability of developers and even non-technical users at all levels. The best part? To enhance your experience with Back4App, we persistently worked to release some of our most requested functionalities, which make the admin tool even constructive and better than ever. This post is arranged to announce the succinct summaries of what has changed.


Alysson Melo

The Clone App Power

The Clone App Power

When you key in ‘How to Clone Apps’ on the internet, a bucket of resources, blog posts, whitepapers, articles, and video tutorials can be discovered on SERPs.

As a developer, at some time, you might have worked in a team that utilizes a shared database for development, User Acceptance Testing (UAT) or deployment. If so, you must also be familiar with many overlaps between projects, contentions for resources, erratic environment stages, and high-level of dependency on other team members to get the end product deployed.


Alysson Melo

The API reference tool

The API reference tool

Back4App has long provided the tools necessary to build software applications. This past week, we released an API Documentation tool to further augment the development experience. The platform automatically generates docs for any objects saved in your database. This includes code snippets for each of the supported programming languages, as well as example requests and responses:

api-reference-code-sample


Alysson Melo

What’s new in Back4App?

What’s new in Back4App?

Our mission at Back4App is to help developers create better code and apps faster, which is why we have been evolving our BaaS platform, introducing intuitive features, and improving our existing capabilities.

Now, we are pleased to announce that Back4App has rolled out a raft of robust and advanced features for the app developers. The new changes and improvements include the latest version of Parse: the Parse Server 3.1.1, a new code assistant to perform CRUD operations in the Back4App cloud database, improved push notification mechanism, query caching option, and the new Analytics toolset.


Alysson Melo

GDPR best practices in 7 steps

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR is effective since May 25, 2018. A lot has been done to make IT companies compliant with GDPR, however, it is just the beginning. Although it applies only to European citizens GDPR rules imposed a new reality in the world and all the efforts made to achieve compliance to this regulation can be lost if organizational practices and infrastructure are not maintained.


Alysson Melo

GDPR FAQ for App developers

 backant-gdpr-lg


 On May 25, 2018, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that has been in the pipeline for a couple of years now goes into effect across European Union EU and European Economic Areas EEA. This has replaced the old privacy laws of 1995. It is a much tougher regime now, not least because companies must adhere to a new framework that creates consistent and reliable data protection rules across the EU and EEA. All businesses that process the personal data of individuals in the EU and EEA must comply with the GDPR or risk strict penalties and fines. The regulators will be able to impose hefty fines on organizations that misuse customers/citizens personal information.


Alysson Melo

The Best 10 Alternatives to Heroku in 2023

The Best 10 Alternatives to Heroku in 2023
heroku-alternatives

Heroku is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) and one of the pioneers of cloud services. Before they came into the scene, developers faced considerable challenges in building and configuring servers from scratch.

Other bottlenecks include shared hosting limitations and the complication of cloud technology and its deployment strategies.

However, the Heroku platform introduced a technology that makes building, scaling, and deploying apps faster and easier than ever. That is why the company became a household name in the developer community.

Heroku is an innovative company that created novel standards for a commercially sustainable cloud service, such as Platform as a Service (PaaS). The company has accomplished a lot, helping many enterprise companies achieve their business objectives. 

However, I recently began to notice that developers were researching Heroku alternatives. So, I started wondering, “Why would developers want to jump ship to a Heroku alternative?”

In this article, you’ll learn why developers want alternatives and available options to Heroku. You’ll also see a comparison table showing each option’s pros and cons and how they compete with Heroku.


Alysson Melo

What is function as a service?

serverless-faas

The general concept in the developer community is that serverless technology is basically all about Function as a service (FaaS). In fact, most developers think another name for serverless is FaaS — a process that allows developers deliver workloads without provisioning and managing facilities like servers and other infrastructures.