Friday, November 7, 2014

CRACKING THE CODE

It may be a relatively-new technology, but cloud computing is fast changing the way we do business. The days of cumbersome data centres and tech teams that were busy managing huge amounts of data, taking back-ups, ensuring data security are on their way out. There are technology companies that are doing all that and more, and leaving you to deal with your core competency area.
Take, for instance, companies such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, which are offering these services in different forms –Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to Platform as a Service (PaaS). Of these Amazon Web Services offers IaaS, while Microsoft and Google offer IaaS as well as PaaS.
Highly popular among these is the Google App Engine, which offers PaaS, and gives you the immense freedom to build and run applications on Google’s infrastructure. These App Engine applications are not only easy to build and maintain but can be scaled up according to the traffic and data. The Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are the perfect solution for small and medium businesses (SMBs) since these businesses don’t have to invest in a server or manage it – you simply upload your application and are ready to go!
The Google App Engine supports apps in Java, Python, PHP and Go and runs apps reliably despite large data. These apps run in a secure environment, with the App Engine allowing distribution requests across multiple servers with scaling-up options available to meet heavy traffic or more data.
Having said that, however, there are gaps and hurdles in the Google App Engine – or any other cloud computing technology, for that matter. For instance, it falls upon the end-user to learn Google App Engine’s infrastructure, its various APIs and build apps on that. The Engine also has certain security measures built in, which make it tougher for an average end-user to grasp easily. This results in the learning curve becoming steeper and longer.
As a result, more man-hours are required since the development cycle is longer. Two, since the technology is relatively new, getting the resources to pick up these technologies is tougher. There is also a scarcity of professionals in the area since you need more specialized and advanced developers for the same.
More importantly, these are new technologies and Google keeps updating its APIs frequently. As a result, there is some part of the code that becomes obsolete and has to be upgraded again. And herein lies the biggest gap – if the end users are maintaining their own custom applications, they have to constantly monitor that part of their code, too.
Infiflex’s Giffy addresses all these issues and more. A generic application, Giffy uses Google App Engine’s APIs and with that framework, you can use customer applications, thus making the learning curve relatively constant and significantly shorter. Giffy resembles most of the current applications or application frameworks. It gives the end-user the freedom to concentrate on the specifics of her business rather than wondering how it is implemented.

Giffy from Infiflex makes it easy to use different kinds of business processes. Most of the things in the app are easy-to-use and understand, what with the click-and-select menu options. What’s more, even the complicated configurations can be worked out by developers with less than three years’ experience. The icing on the cake – all this can be done without redeploying the application because the customizations can be done at run-time. For more on how Giffy can be the answer to all your Google App Engine questions, watch this space. 

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