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Driven by rapidly rising developer salaries,Low Code/No Code software development is expected to grow rapidly over the next 10 years. Gartner forecasted 23% growth in 2021.I took a look at the space and here is what I discovered.Two terms are used interchangeably – “No Code” and “Low Code”. They are the same; the former is for marketing to the business user, and the latter is aimed at IT.There is no such thing as “No Code” when it comes to dealing with APIs, data, etc.But what these tools provide is a GUI that abstracts away stylesheets,JavaScript,databases,and APIs.It empowers non-developers to build functional apps without having to start with a wireframe. Some say that Low Code software development is 3-4x, both faster and cheaper,than regular development.Data can be driven by Excel. enabling business users to build functional apps.I paid attention to six options:Larger players, aimed at intranet apps and automating workflows within the organization – payroll, vacation requests, sick time, approval process, requisitions, etc. Anything where a boxy UI is just fine. It’s all per-user licensing; they don’t have a licensing model that would work for a public app or website.<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li style="">AWS Honeycode</li><li style="">Google AppSheet</li><li style="">MS PowerApps</li></ol></li></ol>Smaller players are aimed at both private and public apps.You pay a license fee,they handle the infrastructure and scale.<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li style="">Adalo.com – highly rated, public apps and websites.Seems to be the better choice if you were creating a native app.</li><li style="">Bubble.io – also a highly rated, public app and website.May not be a good choice for native apps.Allows for more complex apps.</li><li style="">Outsystems.com – Bit more expensive than the first two,and aimed at both corporate users and public apps.</li></ol></li></ol>Each month new Low Code solutions are introduced.The growing number of options may be a detriment to the growth of the space.For example, Low Code for Financial Services, Social Media, Office automation, etc.If aiming at niche markets,you only have to build a subset of controls and objects. From that point of view,I get why it is this way.I decided to build a test app using AWS Honeycode.The end-user has to install the AWS Honeycode App on their mobile devices. But once that is done you can quickly add multiple apps or distribute new versions without the user having to install the software.I was shocked that I was able to add a new field and re-publish it, and a user could see the new field on their phone without even having to restart the app.To me, that is a game-changer especially after struggling with getting apps distributed via the Appstore or Play Store.Low Code is not good for:<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li>High computation</li><li>Low-level app functions – video/audio, animation, etc.</li><li>Some functionality such as location-based (LBS) may not be readily available </li><li>Apps that require a very high level of control over the UI and full customization.</li></ol></li></ol><table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;">&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;</td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank,California since 2015,Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs.As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions,custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting.Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business. <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Low Code/No Code software development is expected to grow rapidly over the next 10 years

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WordPress is the most popular Content Management System (CMS) and powers 37% of websites and 60% of content management systems (CMS)! Many high-traffic websites such as TechCrunch,OptimistDaily,and BBC America use this CMS.Although there are so many other options, WordPress’s low cost, flexibility,and customization functionality results in its popularity.However,there is a limitation in the default WordPress configuration as traffic grows;a single server has both WordPress and the database and does not scale up.Most WordPress sites run in this configuration.Web pages eventually load slower ruining your visitor experience.To overcome this situation while staying with WordPress, a multi-tiered solution is required.Some webmasters who only run the standard single server configuration may need help during the deployment process.Here is a brief guide on how to load balance your WordPress sites.The solution is to move to multiple database servers; this can be easily accomplished using AWS or other cloud providers. AWS offers a Relational Database Service (RDS) that uses SQL for maintaining and querying the data. First, you need to open the RDS console and create a new database from your dashboard. You will be prompted to specify the DB details. Although there are default settings for this,pay attention to the DB instance class and Multi-AZ deployment.For security,create a DB username and password to securely access your DB and relay information.Under the Database option,type DB name and note down your DB port value to be used later.Have a sneak around the other default settings and click “Create Database”.The next step is to modify the ingress rules on RDS instance’s security group.To do this, go to the Amazon RDS console and choose a database to view its details.Under security settings, note the Security Groups and Endpoints.This can come in handy later on.Under the security section,you will also see the security group associated with your DB instance.Click on the link to view the security group in the EC2 Console.Once open, choose “Inbound” in security group details.Click “Edit” and then add your Rule and Type and select mysql that your application uses.Lastly,modify the source table or type “sg-” to view a list of available security groups.Click ‘save’ and let the configuration take place.Meanwhile,download WordPress along with the configuration files since you will need it later to deploy it on your server.Extract WordPress in your directory and the configuration files over the WordPress installation.As you do this,you are already halfway to deploying your first WordPress website using Amazon RDS.But we still need to work around with the Elastic Beanstalk Environment (EBE).Use the AWS Management Console to create an EBE.You also need to choose the PHP platform and accept the default settings and sample code.Click on Configure more settings, select high availability,scroll down and click on modify Auto Scaling group. Select number of max servers as additional servers will be billed as per standard charges.Click save and on the next screen click create.Once you create the ‘’Environment’’ you can configure and connect it to the database created earlier.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;Upon successful configuration,deploy the WordPress code to the environment you downloaded from the repository.You can also launch the Elastic Beanstalk console.Upon loading,you need to choose the language of the platform such as English,Spanish or Arabic,etc.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; For Application Code, choose the sample application and then click on ‘‘Review and Launch’’. You will be prompted to review the options,and once you are satisfied, hit “Create App”. The creation of the environment takes a few minutes and creates the following six resources.1.EC2 Instance 2.Instance Security Group 3.Load Balancer 4.Load Balancer Security Group 5.Auto Scaling Group 6.AWS Cloud Formation Stack and a Domain NameElastic Beanstalk will manage all of the above resources. So make sure to not terminate your environment as it will terminate all your resources. The Amazon RDS DB is launched outside of the environment so you will also need to carefully manage its life cycle.Make sure to configure and verify the structure of your WordPress Beanstalk Folder. You need to configure the environment property section by providing a database endpoint username and password mentioned above.Finally,you can install WordPress and have your website up and running.To complete the installation, open the Elastic Beanstalk Console and navigate to the management page for your environment. Choose the environment URL to open your site in a browser and you will automatically be redirected to the WordPress installation Wizard.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Perform the standard installation.Since the database is already connected to the environment,you won’t be prompted to configure the DB. Installation takes a few minutes to complete,after which you can successfully run your load-balanced WordPress using AWS.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank,California since 2015,Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Load balance a high traffic WordPress site on AWS

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With smartphones ubiquitous,companies are adding camera functionality to their apps to take photos or scans of documents,people,checks, identification cards, real estate,and whatever else.The majority of apps simply utilize the camera to take a photo which is then uploaded.However, customers want a more sophisticated experience that includes features such as cropping,edge detection,editing,filtering,formatting,and sharing. Writing that functionality from scratch would take considerable development time, but like everything in IT,there are 3rd party vendors that sell Android and IOS SDKs.Recently we took a look at a few for a project. Here is a quick summary of our assessment and how we chose a solution.Initial research came up with the following options:&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Commercial solutions:<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li>Scanbot SDK</li><li>Klippa SDK</li><li>Genius Scan SDK</li><li>PixelNetica Document Scanning SDK</li><li>Open source solutions:</li><li>WeScan SDK</li><li>OpenScan SDK </li></ol></li></ol>Interestingly most of the commercial offerings were from companies based in Europe.They all release new versions of their software as hardware and operating systems are updated. Also, they all still work when the device is offline; so they don’t offer a usage-only model. Scanbot SDK was our first choice after our technology assessment;it had all the features we needed. But after further digging, we found that pricing started at $23,000/year! They have four different packages and the version we wanted was actually $50,000 per year!This far exceeded the project’s budget.I spoke to Scanbot and they were very helpful but unwilling to offer any discounts. Their target market consists of large companies and enterprise clients.We looked at Klippa which starts at around $5,000 per year,Genius Scan which starts at $4,000/year, and Pixelnetica which starts at $3,600 a year.Going into the research, we thought we might be able to find a solution for perhaps $1,000 for a permanent license.We ruled out Pixelnetica because it would require us to write bridge components to get it to work in our app. We also didn’t feel comfortable going with the unsupported WeScan and OpenScan open-source solutions. We ended up choosing Genius Scan SDK over Klippa. It had all the features required and was easy to implement. You also don’t need to pay the yearly fee until the app goes live.Creating a demo app as a proof of concept took only a few hours.To evaluate functionality without any development, one can spend a few dollars and install and experiment with the single-user version that they all offer.Our client tested our POC, approved the functionality, and greenlit development.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Easily add scanning functionality to your app

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We are developing an app that requires scanning documents and extracting key information; the extraction is then used to update the relevant user data. We looked at several technologies including AWS Textract, Azure Computer Vision, Google Lens and the open-source technology, Tesseract. All were feature-rich and have certain strengths, but in our case, the documents to be scanned are multipage and heavy on tabular &amp; form data. Due to the amount of structured data, we decided to go with Textract.Textract uses OCR to auto-detect printed text, handwriting, and numbers. All extracted data is returned in a polygon frame with bounding box coordinates. You can detect key-value pairs and context making it easy to import extracted data. Textract also preserves the composition of data stored in tables. This is helpful for documents that are composed of structured data, such as financial reports and medical records. You then load the extracted data using a predefined database schema. Textract can extract data with high confidence scores, whether the text is free-form or embedded in tables. Amazon Textract uses ML to understand the context of invoices and receipts and automatically extracts relevant data such as vendor, invoice #, price, total amount, and payment terms. Textract also uses ML to understand the context of identity documents such as passports and drivers’ licenses without the need for templates or configuration. When extracting information from documents, Amazon Textract returns a confidence score so you can make informed decisions about how to use the results. Amazon Textract is directly integrated with Amazon Augmented AI (A2I) so you can implement a human review process when the confidence score is low.&nbsp; The UI/UX flow requires that documents are scanned using the camera. The document is uploaded to an S3 bucket. A Lambda function is invoked to call the AWS Textract API. Behind the scenes, AWS Textract processes the document and spits out a very long JSON that describes the contents, location in the document, and metadata. Along with the JSON, Textract also creates a CSV file containing all structured data. Upon completion, Textract notifies our callback function that stores the extracted structured data. We then invoke another service to run that data against our matching model,extract the data needed, and update the database.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; Textract supports both synchronous and asynchronous calls.The synchronous design is to support small mostly single-page documents and we can get near real-time responses. However, we had to go with the asynchronous call since most of our documents are multiple pages. The main drawback of asynchronous processing is that it can take several minutes, negatively affecting the user experience. Breaking the document into single pages and scanning them via synchronous calls is a possibility, but there is a lot of overhead going that route.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" target="_blank">Contact us</a> if you need help adding OCR to your application<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

OCR and extracting text using AWS Textract

We are currently developing an IOS app for a client using React Native.We are using the AWS technology stack as the backend with Amplify,Aurora Serverless,Code Commit,and various other AWS services.Our DevOps team attempted to automate a continuous integration (CI) continuous delivery (CD) process and faced some challenges.I will note what we tried and the issues we faced, both financial and technical,and see if anyone has other suggestions.&nbsp; The software development and DevOps teams are working remotely and distributed across multiple countries.In order to create the iOS app build,we needed a virtual Mac server to install Xcode and the required dependencies to create the build file. We looked at an AWS EC2 Instance with MacOS but the costs at $2,000/month were too high for our client. So we started looking for third-party solutions that provided IOS app build service as well as CI/CD pipelines. We looked at CodeMagic, CircleCI, and Semaphore CI and concluded that CodeMagic was the only choice because the others did not support AWS CodeCommit. Codemagic also provided both build functionality as well as pipelines to Apple Connect.Additionally,CodeMagic is free for a single user with 500 minutes of build time with Xcode running on a Mac Mini,which works fine for our initial setup and development. Since we are below that threshold,it’s free for now.&nbsp; &nbsp; DevOps easily integrated CodeMagic with AWS Code Commit with a very simple process.But then tried to configure a webhook for automated builds but was unable to connect.CodeMagic tech support said that at the moment they do not support continuous integration when connected to AWS CodeCommit. However,our team is already working on adding the webhook support and it will be featured shortly!!&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; The idea was to fully automate the process but we ran into two problems<ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li style="list-style-type: none;" data-mce-style="list-style-type: none;"><ol><li style="">Code Magic does not fully support AWS. We have to fetch the code manually.</li><li style="">&nbsp;AWS does not support IOS builds and pipelines.So at this point, our DevOps team is manually triggering the builds.Update 11/28: CodeMagic is now supporting webhooks for AWS Code Commit.I will report back if this allows us to automate the build process.</li></ol></li></ol></li></ol><a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" target="_blank" data-mce-selected="inline-boundary">Contact us </a>if you need help automating your virtual IOS pipeline.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank,California since 2015,Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs.As a Managed Service Provider (MSP),we offer a range of services including cloud solutions,custom programming,mobile app development, marketing dashboards,and strategic IT consulting.Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently,allowing you to focus on growing your business.<a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us">Contact us</a> to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Automating an IOS CI/CD pipeline

Anyone evaluating AWS Aurora Serverless v2 beta? We’ve been using v1 the last few months and had the following concerns.<ol><li style="">Does not support RDS proxy leading to a high number of connections from lambda and other services</li><li style="">Lack of redundancy/failover</li><li style="">Only Supports MySQL version 5.6, which is very old</li><li style="">Event_scheduler is not supported</li><li style="">Number of connections utilize more ACU</li><li style="">Occasional timeouts during scaling</li><li style="">Instance warmup takes time</li></ol>UPDATE: AWS will be releasing v2 in 2022 that will hopefully address some of these issues.&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Contact us</a> if you need help implementing Aurora Serverless.<table style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;" border="1" data-mce-style="border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%;"><tbody><tr><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td><td style="width: 10%;" data-mce-style="width: 10%;"> </td></tr></tbody></table>Based in Burbank, California since 2015, Vimware is dedicated to supporting small to midsize businesses and agencies with their behind-the-scenes IT needs. As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), we offer a range of services including cloud solutions, custom programming, mobile app development, marketing dashboards, and strategic IT consulting. Our goal is to ensure your technology infrastructure operates smoothly and efficiently, allowing you to focus on growing your business. <a data-mce-href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us" href="https://vimware.com/about/contact-us">Contact us </a>to learn how we can assist in optimizing your IT operations.

Blog

Low Code/No Code software development is expected to grow...

Load balance a high traffic WordPress site on AWS

Easily add scanning functionality to your app

OCR and extracting text using AWS Textract

Automating an IOS CI/CD pipeline

Review of AWS Aurora Serverless v1