A fire drill for your security infrastructure

FourCore

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2022 was a tough year for crypto and the blockchain industry. Cryptocurrencies plunged into unrealized losses, with Bitcoin seeing a below its November 2021 all-time high. The 2022 bear market tested resilience, but the industry clung on with continuous innovations. That year was a crucible, forging narratives and trends poised to propel the next wave of innovation and impactful projects for the next bull season. In this article, we will delve into some of these narratives and explore how they are reshaping the crypto scenery. 73.3% drawdown What are Crypto Narratives? Crypto Narratives are prevailing ideas or stories that dominate the crypto industry at any given time. They essentially represent shared beliefs and expectations about blockchain technology and how its applications influence investor sentiment, market trends, and project development. From NFT season to airdrop season, to memecoins, to a belief that the Bitcoin halving event fuels bull runs every four years, investors (especially in crypto) use these narratives as some sort of North Star to guide their investment sentiment and decisions. The blockchain industry is experiencing a surge in narratives this year, each exploring, revealing, and testing the technology's potential. For an industry still in its nascent stages, the level and amount of narratives emerging are impressive. While these narratives can be exciting, they can also be misleading or just being pushed and taking center stage based on hype. Therefore it's important to scrutinize these narratives before investing in them. In this article, we will look at four crypto narratives that I find exciting and look poised to make major runs this year: Blockchain Modularity Blockchain technology is embracing modularity to overcome limitations and unlock new possibilities. Early blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum handle tasks within a single structure, and now, the focus is shifting towards modular architectures that break down blockchains into specialized components. This shift is driven by the need for enhanced scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency in meeting the demands of a growing ecosystem. Modular blockchains deconstruct operations into four core components; consensus, execution, settlement, and data availability. This concept —modularity— is permeating both Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchains. The OP Stack modularizes Layer-2 elements into open-source modules, while Celestia, a Layer 1 chain, focuses on consensus and data availability, letting Layer-2s built on top optimize execution. This trend signals a new era of blockchain evolution, characterized by specialized components working in tandem to achieve unprecedented levels of efficiency, flexibility, and scalability. Scalability limitations have often been the Achilles heel of the blockchain. It is crucial to address scaling challenges, and solutions like layer-2 protocols and cross-chain bridges are paving the way for faster and more affordable transactions. Imagine a world where blockchains and DeFi platforms process transactions in milliseconds, data storage solutions scale to handle the ever-growing ocean of information, and immersive blockchain games with lag-free experiences. SparqNet provides an architecture that empowers developers with a suite of tools and services to build blazing-fast (up to 400k TPS) blockchains, programmable in any language, and seamlessly integrated with the Avalanche ecosystem. Learn-to-earn Long criticized for its rigid structures and limited access, the education industry is finding an ally in blockchain technology. This 'partnership' of sorts is incentivizing learning by rewarding both content creators and learners with cryptocurrency or Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for their engagement. In this narrative, students earn tokens while learning and mastering concepts, and educators monetize their expertise through gamified learning modules. The tokens market is increasingly competitive and this model is a win-win for both the companies behind the platforms and the people who learn on them. Projects are leveraging NFTs and blockchain to create a collaborative ecosystem where learners progress through interactive courses while earning token rewards for their achievements. Educators also benefit from their content, by building dedicated communities and receiving royalties for each learner's progress. According to a report by Global Market Insights, the global e-learning market valued at $339.3 billion in 2022, is bound to to about $1 trillion by 2032 at a CAGR of 14%, highlighting the immense potential of blockchain-powered education platforms. Projects like Edu3labs and Mogaland are pioneering the learn-to-earn concept on the blockchain. rise Decentralized Privacy 2024 is set to witness the rise of a critical narrative in the blockchain; decentralized privacy. This concept, once a fringe ideal, is now evolving into a powerful narrative driven by a confluence of factors. Centralized data storage has become synonymous with breaches, leaks, and government overreach. The surging public consciousness is igniting a fire for data sovereignty. With decentralized privacy solutions, individuals have an alternative where they can own and manage their data, reducing reliance on vulnerable centralized systems. Erosion of Trust: The beauty of the blockchain lies in its distributed nature. Decentralized privacy protocols leverage this network effect to create robust, censorship-resistant systems. This paves the way for a future where your online identity isn't held captive by a single entity but instead secured by a distributed network of nodes. This decentralized architecture makes manipulation or breaches unfeasible. The Power of the Network Effect: Innovations like zero-knowledge proofs, homomorphic encryption, and secure multi-party computation are setting the stage for practical decentralized privacy solutions. These technologies enable secure data sharing and computation without revealing sensitive information, opening up a new era of privacy-preserving transactions and communication. Convergence of Technologies: The implications of this narrative are far-reaching. In an ideal privacy-effective world,  you will own and manage your data, communicate and transact anonymously, and access decentralized social media seamlessly. ATOR Protocol is leveraging a globally distributed network of relays to build a decentralized network for internet privacy. Meme-Powered Marketing Memes are digital jabs of wit and satire that have found fertile ground in the world of crypto. This culture serves for more than just entertainment; it acts as a social glue, fostering community, spreading awareness, and even influencing market sentiment. A key aspect of crypto memes is their ability to simplify complex concepts. Take for example the infamous "Hodl" meme, a misspelling of "hold" that became a rallying cry for long-term investors. This simple misspelling perfectly captured the sentiment of holding on through market dips, and it resonated with investors across different experience levels. Beyond all the jokes, crypto memes can also exert real-world influence. Dogecoin, a meme-inspired cryptocurrency, skyrocketed in value in 2021, largely fueled by viral tweets from Elon Musk. That event highlighted the power of community-driven hype and the potential for memes to shape market sentiment. BONK, PEPE, SHIBA INU, and at the time of writing WEN are some memecoins that have helped/are helping newbies get into crypto. Buygarbage is another project tapping into the meme culture with its playful meme-generating platform. Conclusion These are just a glimpse into the narratives shaping the future of the crypto industry in 2024. Modularity, Learn-to-earn, decentralized privacy, and meme-driven tokens are just a few trends poised to lead a potential bull run. Always remember that these narratives are dynamic and continually evolving. They are influenced by news events, technological advancements, regulatory decisions, and the actions of influential figures. This article is for educational purposes only and it is important that you critically analyze the validity and potential outcome of any narrative before making investment decisions in the crypto space.

Crypto Narratives to Look Out For in 2024

2024 সালে ক্রিপ্টো ন্যারেটিভস খোঁজার জন্য

Krypto-Erzählungen, auf die man im Jahr 2024 achten sollte

Criptonarrativas a tener en cuenta en 2024

Récits cryptographiques à surveiller en 2024

2024 में देखने लायक क्रिप्टो कथाएँ

2024 年に注目すべき仮想通貨の物語

2024년에 주목해야 할 암호화폐 내러티브

Narrativas criptográficas a serem observadas em 2024

Крипторассказы, на которые стоит обратить внимание в 2024 году

2024'te Dikkat Edilecek Kripto Anlatıları

Những câu chuyện về tiền điện tử cần chú ý vào năm 2024

2024 年值得关注的加密货币叙事

Having long hesitated between development and teaching, today I bring together both of my aspirations to serve everyone, after making an observation that seems rather obvious but is nonetheless concerning: 📌 Tech professionals are not necessarily interested in ecology. 📌 Ecology advocates often have other priorities than digital technology. This is when iTeach was born, a project for an eco-responsible programming learning platform centered around four core values: interactivity, free access, ecology, and privacy. It aims to debunk the misconception that "IT is virtual and has no real environmental impact." 🌍 Indeed, servers, data transfers, everything virtual exists and contributes to our daily ecological footprint. It seems imperative to raise awareness about this, starting with developers, who tend to exploit the abundance of IT resources rather than opting for simplicity and eco-responsibility. 🌱 Regardless of your initial knowledge, iTeach enables you to become a competent web developer. The main courses are designed to train you effectively without delving too much into complex theoretical subjects. An introductory course provides initiation to the web world, followed by a JavaScript course teaching programming concepts and logic. 💻 Next, a React course teaches you how to create your own web applications. To conclude the main curriculum, an eco-design course shows you how to use IT resources responsibly, combining simplicity and efficiency. Optional additional courses cover advanced concepts and related topics for those wishing to go beyond the basics. You can also find cheat sheets for each course, providing a quick reference to a concept and copying relevant code snippets. While many platforms offer theoretical courses, whether free or paid, using videos or images, offering projects to clone, files to download, focusing on specific themes or a broader range of courses... On iTeach, you have an all-in-one solution that allows you to quickly build skills without falling into the pitfalls of overly theoretical and complex courses. This is made possible through code snippets to complete directly on the course page and end-of-chapter quizzes! Moreover, no installation is required; you can learn and practice from anywhere, anytime. To top it off, an additional "sandbox" section allows you to practice freely by choosing an initial code from a list of presets. Perhaps the project's strongest and most distinctive value is ecology, also the most underrepresented in the digital world. That's why iTeach goes against the tide by offering a dedicated eco-design course. Additionally, strong actions are taken: the almost complete absence of media on the entire platform, no calls to external services, and no database system. In short, the goal is to use as few resources as possible to operate the system. To give you an idea, browsing the entire platform consumes less bandwidth than watching 3 seconds of a high-quality video! This inevitably results in some constraints, such as regarding statistics: not using a remote storage system means they are managed and stored locally. Another value that is not given enough priority (although increasingly considered since the implementation of GDPR) is privacy. Fortunately, its implementation naturally stems from the ecology pillar because no behavioral analysis is carried out via a tool like Google Analytics, no advertising cookies are required, and thus, no data is transmitted. The absence of a database and login system also means that no personal information is stored. 🕵🏻‍♂️ What you need to remember is that privacy is a cornerstone of iTeach, aiming to go beyond the general rule that free services ultimately have a cost. But then, how could such a project come to life and, more importantly, remain sustainable? What is its business model? In reality, the choice is to have almost none. The only planned funding comes from a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, with the pre-launch link . You can also browse the beta version of the platform , but expect all the information to be detailed when the Kickstarter launches. already available here here Why Kickstarter? iTeach is a time-consuming project and does not intend to generate revenue in the long run. However, it is necessary to verify that the project can generate enough interest while allowing its development to be financed. It is also crucial to get your feedback, in order to ensure the platform will have the best quality one would expect, despite being free. 💸 The campaign will be launched on February 13 and will last for a month. Having already conducted such a campaign in the past but for a completely different domain, I know that it is possible to rally around ideas that are worthwhile, and I hope that this one will seem to be part of that category. 💫

ITeach — the Eco-responsible Programming Learning Platform

Table of contents Prerequisites What is Web Accessibility Principles of Web Accessibility Versions of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Web accessibility and ReactJs Testing and Debugging Accessibility Conclusion In the world we live in today, the Internet serves as the most essential gateway to information, services, and opportunities for people all over the world. However, for millions of individuals with disabilities, the online experience can often be riddled with barriers, limiting their access to the digital world. This is where the concept of web accessibility steps in—a pivotal approach that ensures everyone, regardless of their abilities, can navigate, interact, and engage with websites and applications seamlessly. In this article, we explore what web accessibility is, how it intersects with , and the core principles of web accessibility. ReactJs Prerequisites This article assumes that the reader knows Basic , and . HTML, CSS JavaScript, ReactJs What is Web Accessibility According to , Web accessibility or eAccessibility is the inclusive practice of ensuring there are no barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to, websites on the World Wide Web by people with physical disabilities, situational disabilities, and socio-economic restrictions on bandwidth and speed. Effectively, Web accessibility strives to ensure that everyone is included when it comes to accessing the web. Wikipedia With the help of experts in the digital accessibility field, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) published the first version of the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) in 1999. These guidelines exist to help developers and designers create web content that is accessible to people with disabilities. However, with the advancement of technology over the last two decades, the World wide web consortium (W3C) has updated its WCAG guidelines to address new technical issues and share accessibility improvement insights. These guidelines are summarized into four core principles. Principles of Web Accessibility To ensure consistency of accessibility throughout the web, the principles of web accessibility should be taken as a sort of criteria to be met for every website or web application. These principles are often summarized using the acronym "POUR" which stands for Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. Let us delve into them. : The content displayed on a website or webpage should be available for consumption for every kind of user. Overlooking this puts users with visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments at a great disadvantage. Some simple practices that will make your web content perceivable are: Perceivable Adding alternative text to image content to provide meaning to users that cannot see them. Including captions and transcripts of audio and video content. Ensuring text content has enough contrast against the background to improve readability. Avoiding the use of color-coded diagrams to convey information. : Content on your website or web application should be easy to read, use, navigate, and interact with. This ensures inclusivity for users with motor or dexterity impairments. Some ways this can be implemented are: Operable Ensuring interactive elements like buttons and links are easily selectable and clickable. Ensuring users have enough time to interact and read content by avoiding self-loading content. Ensuring users can navigate your site using just the keyboard. : Text content occupies a large part of most websites, and making sure that text content on your website is understandable, identifiable, concise, and readable to the broadest audience possible is important. Some ways you achieve this are: Understandable Using the clearest and simplest language possible or providing simplified versions. Providing meaning or context for uncommon words or abbreviations. Ensuring content is arranged consistently. : Content is said to be robust when it is compatible with a range of different web browsers, assistive technologies, and . Some ways to implement robust designs are: Robust user agents Providing a name, role, and value for non-standard user interface components. Avoiding reliance on specific browsers or technologies that might limit accessibility. Ensuring markdowns can be reliably interpreted. Versions of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Now that we understand the principles, let us take a brief look at the versions of the WCAG so far. The guidelines are organized into three priority levels; Priority 1 (A), Priority 2 (AA), and Priority 3 (AAA). Each guideline was associated with checkpoints that provide specific requirements for achieving accessibility. These checkpoints were further divided into specific techniques that developers could follow to meet the requirements. : Consisted of 14 guidelines that serve as the principles of accessible design. WCAG 1.0 : This update came when mobile Internet devices were just becoming popular, making it difficult to predict what the future use of mobile devices would look like. WCAG 2.0 : Released in June 2018, it adds 17 new success criteria to version 2.0. These new guidelines are built around helping people who have low-level vision, cognitive disabilities, and learning disabilities. It also includes guidelines to assist in removing mobile technology barriers. WCAG 2.1 As of the time of writing this article, WCAG version 2.2 have not been released, but they have been said to include information about improving accessibility of mobile applications. You can learn more about these guidelines . here Web accessibility and ReactJs ReactJs has cemented itself as the for 40.6 percent of JavaScript developers worldwide (According to Statista, 2023). That said, with a large number of developers using the technology for websites globally, it becomes important for these websites to be accessible for all kinds of users. go-to UI library So how exactly does React achieve this? Several simple practices can be implemented to ensure that your ReactJs application is accessible. Some of these practices are: : Semantic HTML elements can be said to be the backbone of accessibility for any web application. Sometimes HTML semantics are broken when we group elements like lists ( , , ) and HTML tables in elements. In cases like this, it would be best practice to make use of React Fragments. The code snippet below shows how to implement them. Utilizing semantic HTML elements in React components <ol> <ul> <table <div> import React, { Fragment } from 'react';

  function ListItem({ item }) {
    return (
      <Fragment>
        <dt>{item.term}</dt>
        <dd>{item.description}</dd>
      </Fragment>
    );
  }

  function Glossary(props) {
    return (
      <dl>
        {props.items.map(item => (
          <ListItem item={item} key={item.id} />
        ))}
      </dl>
    );
  } Manage focus appropriately to ensure keyboard users can navigate through your application smoothly. You can use the attribute to access DOM elements and apply focus programmatically. The attribute can also be used to control the order in which elements receive focus. Enabling keyboard navigation and focus management: ref tabIndex import React, { useEffect, useRef } from 'react';

  function FocusableComponent() {
    const myRef = useRef();

    useEffect(() => {
      myRef.current.focus();
    }, []);

    return (
      <div tabIndex="0" ref={myRef}>
          Focusable Element
      </div>
      );
  }

  export default FocusableComponent; . Providing alternative text for images and icons used in React components : ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) attributes provide additional accessibility information to assistive technologies. For instance, you can use attributes to define the purpose of an element, such as a navigation menu or a button. Additionally, attributes like , , and can provide context and labels for screen readers. Implementing ARIA roles and attributes for enhanced accessibility role aria-label aria-describedby aria-labelledby import React from "react";

  function myButton () {
      return (
          <button aria-label="Close" role="button" onClick={handleClose}>
            <span aria-hidden="true">×</span>
          </button>
      )
  } To learn more about accessibility, you can check out the official documentation . here Testing and Debugging Accessibility Accessibility testing involves assessing your web application's usability for individuals with disabilities. By evaluating your application from these perspectives, you can uncover areas that might hinder user experience for certain groups. Some techniques for testing and debugging accessibility are: Automated Accessibility Testing Tools: Axe is a widely used accessibility testing tool that enables testers with little knowledge of accessibility to perform step-by-step manual accessibility testing. It can be integrated into your browser's developer tools or used as a standalone extension. To learn more about this tool, visit . Axe: here Lighthouse is an integrated tool in Chrome DevTools that offers accessibility audits and then gives an accessibility score, among other performance checks. You can learn more about this tool Lighthouse: here. Performing manual testing operations on your application is essential for catching nuanced issues that automated tools might miss. Some manual testing techniques include: Manual Accessibility Testing: Navigate through your application using only the keyboard to ensure all interactive elements are reachable and usable. Keyboard Testing: Use screen reader software (e.g., VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA) to experience your application as users with visual impairments would. Verify that information is conveyed accurately and interactions are meaningful. Screen Reader Testing: Adjust your browser settings to simulate low vision conditions and test whether your application remains usable. Zoom and High Contrast Testing: Focus Management Testing: Verify that focus indicators (such as outlines) are present and properly styled for keyboard users. Ensure that focus is not trapped in certain elements and that it moves in a logical order. Semantic HTML and ARIA Testing: Review your and verify that you're using appropriate semantic elements (e.g., headings, lists) to convey content hierarchy. HTML structure Check your usage of ARIA attributes to provide additional context to assistive technologies. Real User Testing: Engage users with disabilities in usability testing. Essentially this is also a way to uncover real-world accessibility challenges that automated tools might not detect. Gather feedback on pain points and areas that might need improvements. Conclusion Including web accessibility while building React applications is not an optional consideration; it's an essential responsibility that we all share as web developers. In a world that thrives on digital interactions, ensuring equal access to information, services, and experiences for every individual is paramount. By adopting a proactive approach to accessibility, we can bridge the gap between technology and inclusion, creating a more compassionate and universally usable online environment.

Enhancing Web Accessibility in React Applications

Imagine having a house where you trust everyone inside, but as soon as they step out, they are treated as strangers until they can prove their identity. They must ring the doorbell, show their face, and possibly answer a security question each time they want to reenter. This is the essence of (ZTNA), a modern approach to network security. Zero Trust Network Access What is ZTNA? is like the strict but fair parent of the internet world, it doesn't trust anyone until they prove themselves to be trustworthy. It follows a simple rule, "deny access to everyone and everything unless explicitly allowed." In the traditional model, once someone gained access to the network, they could wander around freely. But ZTNA, much like a vigilant parent, limits what users can "see" and do, restricting them only to the specific applications and resources they need to use. ZTNA : Vested Interest Disclosure The author is an independent contributor publishing via our . Be it through direct compensation, media partnerships, or networking, the author has a vested interest in the company/ies mentioned in this story. HackerNoon has reviewed the report for quality, but the claims herein belong to the author. #DYOR brand-as-author program Why Do We Need ZTNA? In our rapidly evolving digital world, the boundaries that once defined our working environment are disappearing. The traditional "castle-and-moat" approach where everything inside the corporate network is trusted, and everything outside is untrusted, isn't effective anymore. As more people work remotely and applications shift to the cloud, the need for a more stringent security model has increased, and ZTNA fills that gap. ZTNA allows for greater visibility and control over who accesses what in your network, reducing the risk of breaches and data leaks. Gartner that by 2023, 60% of enterprises would replace their old VPNs with ZTNA solutions. predicted Use Cases for ZTNA The versatile and adaptive nature of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) makes it applicable across several scenarios. Let's delve into these contexts, and understand how ZTNA caters to different needs effectively. ZTNA as a VPN Alternative: Guided Tours in the Digital World Traditional Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) often operate on an 'all-or-nothing' model. Once a user is allowed access, they essentially have the keys to the kingdom, granting them access to the entire network. This is akin to letting a visitor wander through a museum without any supervision, potentially putting sensitive exhibits at risk. ZTNA changes this model completely. Rather than granting blanket access, it restricts users only to the resources they need to fulfill their tasks. In essence, ZTNA is like giving a guided tour of the museum to the visitor, allowing them to see only the exhibits relevant to their interests. It ensures the protection of sensitive network resources, while still providing users with the access they require. Third-Party Access: Lending a Book, Not the House Keys In today's interconnected business world, organizations often need to provide network access to third parties like vendors, contractors, or consultants. Traditional access controls can make this a risky proposition, like giving someone the keys to your entire house just to let them borrow a book. ZTNA revolutionizes this process, allowing organizations to provide secure, granular access to third parties. It's like lending a book to a friend, but instead of giving them your house keys, you hand over the book at your doorstep. ZTNA ensures third-party users only have access to the specific applications and resources they need for their tasks, minimizing the potential for unauthorized access or data breaches. Secure M&A Integration: Managing Guests in a Corporate Merger During mergers and acquisitions (M&As), integrating two different network systems can be a complex and challenging process. Traditional access controls can make this process akin to trying to merge two guest lists for a grand event, with the potential for confusion, mix-ups, and security issues. With ZTNA, this process becomes significantly more manageable. in an M&A scenario works much like an efficient receptionist at a merged company, carefully checking every guest, confirming their identities, and guiding them to their designated locations. It allows for secure, controlled access for the newly merged entities, ensuring the integrity of both networks is maintained while achieving seamless integration. ZTNA By offering customizable and context-aware security, ZTNA provides a flexible solution to various access needs and challenges. It makes network security more robust and dynamic, adapting to a wide range of situations, from everyday operations to significant corporate transitions. ZTNA in Action: A Detailed Look at Its Four Core Processes When it comes to the implementation of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) in an enterprise setting, the system operates by adhering to a four-step process: Identify, Enforce, Monitor, and Adjust. Let's delve into each step with a more detailed perspective to truly grasp how ZTNA operates. Identify: The Roll Call of the Digital World Just as a school teacher begins the day by taking roll call of all the students, the ZTNA process starts by identifying the entire gamut of systems, applications, and resources within the organization's network. This stage involves meticulously mapping out all the potential access points to the network. It's like a warehouse manager taking inventory of all the items present. The manager needs to know what goods are in the warehouse, their quantities, and their specific locations. Similarly, ZTNA first identifies all the network's resources and acknowledges who might need access to them. This comprehensive understanding forms the foundation for setting access controls in the next stage. Enforce: Setting the Rules of the House Once ZTNA has a complete map of all network resources, the next step is to enforce access controls. These are the rules of the house, defining the conditions under which individuals can access these resources. Think of it like the rules set by parents for their teenage children. Certain areas of the house, like the parent's bedroom or the home office, might be off-limits unless necessary. The child may only access these areas under specific conditions – perhaps when the parents are around, or only for a limited time. Similarly, ZTNA sets the rules for accessing the different resources within a network, enforcing stringent conditions based on the user's role, the sensitivity of the resource, and other context-aware factors. Monitor: Keeping a Close Eye on the Network ZTNA isn't just about setting rules; it's also about vigilantly ensuring they're followed. Like a network's personal CCTV system, ZTNA monitors all activities within the network. It logs and analyzes all access attempts and interactions with the network resources. Imagine a security guard at a shopping mall. Their job isn't over once they've let a customer in. They must continually monitor the customers to prevent theft and ensure everyone's safety. Similarly, ZTNA doesn't stop working once access is granted. It continuously watches over the network, ensuring that all users are adhering to the access rules set in the previous stage. Adjust: Ensuring a Balanced Network Environment The final step in the ZTNA process is adjusting the access controls as needed. If ZTNA finds that the rules are too strict or too lax, or if the network's needs change over time, the controls are tweaked to maintain the perfect balance between productivity and security. Consider a city's traffic management system. If a particular intersection sees frequent traffic jams or accidents, the city might adjust the traffic signal timings or add additional signage. The goal is to create a smoother, safer traffic flow. Likewise, ZTNA adjusts the access controls based on ongoing monitoring and feedback, ensuring the network stays secure without hindering the users' productivity. Conclusion In an increasingly interconnected and remote world, traditional network security measures fall short. Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) presents a modern, comprehensive solution that keeps up with the evolving landscape of network security. It doesn't blindly trust but verifies and limits access, protecting valuable data from breaches and leaks. Just like a vigilant parent or a strict but fair security guard, ZTNA provides the tough love our networks need to stay safe. Don’t forget to like and share the story!

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): Why You Need It and How It Works

Acceso a la red Zero Trust (ZTNA): por qué lo necesita y cómo funciona

Accès réseau Zero Trust (ZTNA) : pourquoi vous en avez besoin et comment cela fonctionne

जीरो ट्रस्ट नेटवर्क एक्सेस (जेडटीएनए): आपको इसकी आवश्यकता क्यों है और यह कैसे काम करता है

ゼロトラスト ネットワーク アクセス (ZTNA): 必要な理由とその仕組み

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): Por que você precisa e como funciona

Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA): Tại sao bạn cần nó và nó hoạt động như thế nào

零信任网络访问 (ZTNA)：为什么需要它以及它如何工作

The cryptocurrency industry is notorious for its ability to use exotic terminology to confuse the shit out of non-technical people. Hell, sometimes even the most technical of people can get lost in the sauce. The absurd rate of innovation that takes place in crypto is a breeding ground for new ideas. These new ideas require new, yet familiar forms of being communicated. One of the most overused forms of communication is through the formulation of terminology as “PROOF-OF- ”. xyz Everybody is always trying to prove something & this is for good reason, after all, the very essence of blockchain is “Don’t Trust, Verify.” However, at some point it all just becomes overwhelming. Today we put an end to this! Ok, not really, but we will dissect one of the most important technical aspects upon which the entire industry is built: Consensus Mechanisms This is a very dense topic that requires an understanding of many different technical elements; I will try to break them all down as we go through it & provide links/resources for those that want to dive in deeper. Cryptocurrency operates through a cloud computing system called a DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology), such as a Blockchain or DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph). This technology has been developed as a solution to a computational “paradigm” known as which explains the difficulty of establishing secure communication in decentralized environments. The Byzantine Generals Problem Basically, if 3 generals surround a city & want to capture it, they must attack all at once. Any less than all 3 & the plan will fail. How can these generals coordinate with each other if there is so much risk involved in sending a message? The messenger getting lost, being delayed, losing the message, forging a fake message, getting caught by the enemy or just lying about it. It is actually a pretty stimulating read for anybody interested; but for the sake of brevity, we must move on. Blockchains/DLTs are (supposed to be) immutable, transparent, append-only digital ledgers that provide an operational guarantee of consistently only showing the truth. These properties have given blockchain technology the colloquial nickname as “ ”. the trust machine While we intuitively know what trust is, defining it is no simple task. Trust is the assurance that future outcomes are dependable. It is the ability to put faith into something/someone without the fear, uncertainty, or doubt of that something/someone fucking you over. Trusting is the ability to make a decision, with a high degree of confidence, and not have to worry about the counterparty risk. Consensus mechanisms are the vehicles for establishing the truth, avoiding non-truth, & in turn garnering user trust in cryptocurrencies. What is a consensus mechanism? As it relates to crypto, consensus mechanisms provide the dual functionality of security guarantees & reward regulation. They are systems/protocols that are used to agree on a single version of history for all the chain’s activity. A code of conduct for establishing a common agreement on the shared, single, true state. They dictate:- who verifies & confirms the transactions that are submitted into a blockchain block(s).- how that verification & confirmation happens- who & how is somebody rewarded for their efforts/contributions This is where things get a little tricky: Consensus mechanisms do not have to only have to deal with the cold hard computational logic of blockchain security. They can be used to express the coming to an agreement of trust on virtually any arbitrary social, technical or mechanical element. The nuances of the delicate architecture behind consensus mechanisms are extremely complex… but at the highest level they can be boiled down to four core composing design elements: Computational complexity The amount of resources & steps that are necessary in order to arrive at the desired outcome (the quicker/shorter, the better) Fault-tolerance At the core of any computational network’s consensus is the ability to maintain operations in the event that network participants drop out or stop working (which can happen sporadically) The higher the fault tolerance, the easier it is to game the system; the lower the tolerance the more resilient the system it. So if the fault tolerance of a system is 51% that means that the system can continue to operate as long as 49% is compromised. If the tolerance is 67%, that means the system can handle only 33% of compromised nodes. Resilience The ability to continue delivering proper results in the event of malicious activity (which can happen for prolonged periods of time) Liveliness The guarantees that even after some unforeseen event happens, the network will continue to operate truthfully Tradeoffs in Mechanisms: There is no single universal mechanism to rule them all. Consensus mechanisms are radically different according to their application. The blockchain trilemma poses that it is impossible to have the presence of all 3 properties: Security, Scalability, & Decentralization in a single system. There can only be some degree of a mixture between 2-of-3 elements. Based on which combination is present in a blockchain, each mechanism will differ according to: - performance - consistency, - scalability, - efficiency While there are hundreds, if not thousands of different mechanisms out in the marketplace today; there are two general types of Consensus mechanisms based on their operational logic, . Every other variation will just be some modular adjustment or combination of these two. proof-of-work & proof-of-stake Now that we have a general understanding of Consensus mechanisms; let’s review some of them: Disclaimer - Not every “Proof-Of-something” serves the same functions as the others. - Not every consensus mechanism needs to have “Proof-Of” in its name. - Byzantine Fault Tolerance is an element of any/every mechanism. POW — Proof Of Work Very High Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: Resource-intensive process of extreme mathematical complexity that demands dedicated hardware. POW consensus is reached via the contribution of computational resources to solving mathematical problems of monstrous complexity. Here, nodes are called miners and earn their rewards through the emission of new network tokens. Leaders for block proposals are chosen on a first-come, first-serve basis according to whoever is able to solve the mathematical problem. Description: POW itself has a built-in sub-rule of “chain weight” or “chain height” & truncation. Whenever POW is running, miners are building their own versions of the next block; however, only one block will be accepted. Meaning that the network will truncate/discard all non-accepted blocks & always recalibrate to the version of the chain that is longest/heaviest (in terms of the amount of work done on it). This is considered the most secure/decentralized model of consensus because of its ability to resist global government scrutiny. , , , POW Examples - Bitcoin (BTC) Dogecoin (DOGE) Litecoin (LTC) Kaspa (KAS) POS — Proof Of Stake moderate-high Decentralization: 67% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: The most popular model for consensus. The concept behind this one is straightforward, users lockup/collateralize their tokens in order to participate. In POS models there are fixed circulating supplies meaning that no new tokens are issued as block rewards, the rewards are earned through the accrual of transaction fees. Additionally, unlike POW, POS models employ stake-slashing for any misbehavior; in the event that malicious/subversive behavior is found, that violating node will have ~50% of its stake forfeited to the network for redistribution amongst the fair nodes. Commonly considered to be less secure & more centralized than POW in the sense that incentives of network nodes are similar to legacy financial systems; deeper-pocketed players have a better chance to own the network nodes. Description: Another important element to not overlook in POS is that there in order to become a node there is a minimal requirement of stake. In the example of Ethereum, it is 32 ETH. The tradeoff with this design is that a high level of truthful activity is expected in order to not lose stake; while it does minimize potential accessibility & in turn, decentralization count. Additionally, POS is known to suffer the “rich getting richer” problem, the consensus is rooted primarily in just the amount/value at stake; therefore those who have more, will earn more & not give others a fair chance. Aside from the prior, the truth of why this scores lower on decentralization than POW is resilience against governments. Governments can in theory hunt down these networks & force them to shut down operations; POS is easier to subvert on a mass scale. However, one major benefit of POS over POW is energy efficiency. , , , , , , POS Examples — Ethereum (ETH) Cardano (ADA) Tezos (TEZ) CELO (CELO) Polkadot (DOT) Avalanche (AVAX) ThorChain (RUNE) dPOS — Delegated Proof Of Stake Low Decentralization: ** 67% : Fault Tolerance Securing blockchain history Use case: The most popular adaptation of regular POS; delegated Proof of Stake is an attempt to democratize access to participation in the network’s operations & rewards. Only the largest can partake in the securing process while smaller-sized token holders “delegate” their tokens to the operating nodes; basically, they vote with their tokens, never giving them to the actual node. dPOS consensus models will typically have in the range of 21–101 nodes that are handling network operations. These network operators are selected based on the amount of tokens they have at stake. The largest benefit of the dPOS variant is that by constraining the amount of nodes; while this leads to centralization, it does also bring the added benefit of faster processing times. Description: , , , , dPOS Examples — Polygon (MATIC) , Tron (TRX) EOS (EOS) Lisk (LSK) Ark (ARK) Radix (XRD) LPOS — Leased Proof Of Stake Low - Moderate Decentralization: 67% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: This is an advanced variation of POS. Very similar to the delegated proof of stake model, Leased Proof-of-Stake provides the technical difference in; that in dPOS the network nodes accrue the rewards & then distribute them to their delegators; but in LPOS users are actually lending their tokens to the nodes, thereby they own a portion of that nodes weight & accrue the rewards directly, rather than through the delegate. The tradeoff here is that to run the physical node, a very high level of technical knowledge & equipment is needed. So far this implementation has only been utilized in one project. Description: LPOS Examples — Waves (WAVES) HPOS — Hybrid Proof Of Stake (also called Proof of Activity) Moderate Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: As the name might have hinted out, HPOS is a creative architecture that leverages both base consensus models (POW + POS). In this model, there are two tiers of processes that take place. On the base level, miners (just as in POW) verify & package transactions into blocks. Then these pre-vetted blocks are submitted into the mempool of the second tier, where POS nodes run an extra round of checks on the blocks & validate them. Description: , HPOS Examples — DASH (DASH) Decred (DCR) PPOS — Pure Proof Of Stake Very High* (not really) Decentralization: 67% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: Another variation of POS. Novel in design when compared to other variations because it is arguably more decentralized (not). This variant does not have a punishment mechanism; so technically bad actors can act badly & not suffer. However, this design is extremely low in its barrier to entry, only 1 single token is required to join as a node. In theory, this is easy to game because a single actor can make a silent-Sybil attack by distributing 1,000 tokens over 1,000 different wallets. Description: PPOS Examples — Algorand (ALGO) POI — Proof Of Importance Low-Moderate Decentralization: 67% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: Reputation-based model that is yet another implementation of POS. Difficult to become accepted as a valid node, easy to get kicked out. I must admit, this one is a little more creative in its approach. Proof of importance utilizes two factors outside of just the stake; these include: Description: 1. the staking nodes’ network activity *(rather than just staking passively, they must contribute to the velocity of the token on the network) 2. the quality of the nodes’ activity (spam transactions will not help) POI Examples — NEM (XEM) POA — Proof Of Authority None - very low' Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: Centralization is the name of the game here. POA utilizes a valuable non-financial primitive to operate, identity. By using identity, all of the operating network participants risk their reputations in order to be part of the consensus circle. Anywhere there is identity there is centralization. However, by having small constrained amounts of known operators, networks that use POA have extremely high throughput potential. This is definitely a mechanism that you want underpinning any public goods blockchains, but that hasn’t stopped projects from leveraging it. Description: not POA Examples — VeChain (VET) pBFT — Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance Low Decentralization: 67% Fault Tolerance: Developing robustness of a mechanism Use case: A key compositional component for building other consensus mechanisms. Typically found in permissioned networks, pBFT works by leveraging the replication of data throughout nodes. Not the most efficient of models due to inherent communication restraints, but very resilient (obviously tolerance is high in centralized systems, the players only have themselves & their friends to blame). Description: pBFT Examples — Zilliqa (ZIL) {uses a mixture of POW + pBFT} dBFT — Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance Low Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Developing robustness of a mechanism Use case: As is the case with its cousin above (pBFT) delegated Byzantine fault tolerance is a compositional element for the creation of more robust blockchain systems. On its own, the mechanism can be used to support distributed communications, however, they are limited by communication constraints that make dBFT systems centralized by default. Description: dBFT Examples — NEO (NEO) POC — Proof Of Capacity/Commitment Low Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: Unique twist on the POW consensus mechanisms; rather than utilizing processing units to constantly solve problems; proof-of-Capacity leverages disk space/memory. POC plots potential solutions to future problems & stores them in the empty disk space of miners. Not to be confused with a total lack of mining, because mining still takes place; it just happens pre-emptively (which then might bring up potential security risks). Not very effective at large scale due to high sensitivity in the event of a node dropping out, which requires a re-plotting of the whole network & becomes less efficient as more mining nodes join (they require additional plotting which then creates huge backlogs on the computers allocating disk space). Description: , , POC Examples — Storj (STORJ) Chia (XCH) Signum (SIGNA) POH — Proof Of History N/A Decentralization: N/A Fault Tolerance: Timestamping & organization Use case: This is not a standalone protocol to build a blockchain on. POH is used with, you guessed it, POS, as a technique used to timestamp transactions using a VRF (verifiable random function) hashing method that allows for blocks in a blockchain to be processed & submitted into a mempool. This allows for a network to continue operations at maximum capacity regardless of what might be happening with any individual node at a given time. If a node did not submit a block on time that is not going to hinder the production of the next block because the delayed block will be organized into its correct position as soon as possible. Description: POS Examples — Solana (SOL) POET — Proof Of Elapsed Time Nope Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing blockchain history Use case: This is an extremely centralized model for building a network, primarily because it is Intellectual property (IP) that is protected by patents & nobody wants to go to war with Intel. Nevertheless, the design itself is brilliant. POET is yet another model that leverages POS logic with a mixture of the Nakamoto consensus principle of the longest/heaviest chain, along with its own added concepts of an internal timer & “resting”. Miner nodes are selected at random & the same node cannot be selected back to back. Once a node commits a block a random timer is put on the node & it falls “asleep”. While it is asleep it does not use any computational resources; which makes this model greener in terms of electrical consumption than other POS variants. Description: POET Example — HyperLedger Sawtooth POA — Proof Of Access Low Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing Storage & data Use case: An augmented version of POW, Proof-of-Access is an algorithm created by the Arweave project that uses a clever technique to verify incoming blocks. Instead of solely relying on the previous block, miners use something called a “recall block” along with a randomly picked previous block. Recall blocks can be thought of as reliable points in the history of the chain that do not require the storage of all the chain data. This creates a lightweight model for proving data, resulting in more efficient storage capabilities, less computational resource waste & increased throughput. One potential downside of this model is that it prefers older nodes due to their history archives; newer nodes do not have access to the same archived data & will only be downloading the recall blocks. Which in theory creates a hierarchy by age. Description: POA Examples — Arweave (AR) POREP — Proof Of Replication N/A Decentralization: 51% Fault Tolerance: Securing Storage & data + Cloud Computing Use case: This beauty of a model is actually an expansion of a predecessor model in data storage (Proof-of-Space) with a build-out integration of POW that prioritizes the ability of storage space on the network/in the operational node’s disk space. There are elements of the pBFT consensus mechanism in that data that is added into the network, is replicated throughout network miners. The ingenuity of POREP is defined by its ability to combat the decentralized cloud computing industry’s most devious attack vector known as a “generation attack”, whereby a mining node pays to upload a document & then infinitely requests that document, collecting fees for providing the storage of it. Description: POREP Examples — Filecoin (FIL) That is only a small sample of how much incredible work is actually out there. Consensus mechanisms are the crux of a distributed system’s trust. The mechanism dictates the rules/laws by which the system operates. Every choice in a system’s design must be made with extreme scrutiny, applying an improper mechanism to a system will cause cognitive dissonance between the users & network operators; in turn, causing a loss of trust. It is impossible to quantify which mechanism is better than the other; everything is contextual, and everything is subjective. With infinite opportunity ahead of us, Thank you for reading May your journey be incredible & Your portfolio be plentiful 🥂 Also published here.

Mastering Consensus Mechanisms: 15 Powerful Forms of Distributed Agreements in Crypto

সম্মতি পদ্ধতির দক্ষতা: ক্রিপ্টোতে বিতরণকৃত চুক্তির 15টি শক্তিশালী ফর্ম

Konsensmechanismen beherrschen: 15 leistungsstarke Formen verteilter Vereinbarungen in Krypto

Dominio de los mecanismos de consenso: 15 poderosas formas de acuerdos distribuidos en criptomonedas

Maîtriser les mécanismes de consensus : 15 formes puissantes d'accords distribués en crypto

मास्टरिंग सर्वसम्मति तंत्र: क्रिप्टो में वितरित समझौतों के 15 शक्तिशाली रूप

コンセンサスメカニズムをマスターする: 15 の暗号化された分散契約の強力な形式

합의 메커니즘 익히기: 암호화폐 분산 계약의 15가지 강력한 형태

Dominando Mecanismos de Consenso: 15 Formas Poderosas de Acordos Distribuídos em Criptomoedas

Mutabakat Mekanizmalarında Uzmanlaşmak: Kriptoda Dağıtılmış Anlaşmaların 15 Güçlü Şekli

Nắm vững các cơ chế đồng thuận: 15 hình thức thỏa thuận phân tán mạnh mẽ trong tiền điện tử

掌握共识机制：15 种强大的加密分布式协议形式

An overly dramatic clickbait title? I don’t think so. We’re at a unique point in time. Blockchain tech, AI, and AR/VR are entering the mainstream. These are no longer things only geeks and degen traders are interested in. And although the number of people using those technologies is growing rapidly, the majority of the population still has no idea how much the world is going to change over the next 5-10 years. Change always leads to uncertainty and challenges but it also creates new opportunities. We’re at the cusp of a shift from web2 to web3 and I expect this to cause as much disruption as the Internet did in the 90s or web2 (social media and mobile internet) did around 2005-2010. Yes, we’re still in the very early days of web3 but this is exactly the right time to build a web3-equivalent of Amazon, Google, or Facebook. Sure, not everyone will (or even wants to) build a multi-billion dollar company. But there are still countless benefits of being an early adopter, whether you want to offer a product, a service, or create content in this space. Web3 is based on four main technologies: -	Blockchain -	NFTs (I will explain later why I listed NFTs separately) -	AI -	AR/VR/mixed reality Strictly speaking, none of those technologies is new. So why do I think that we’re at such a critical point in time? Let’s go back to the early days of web2, around 2005-2007, and see what happened during those few years. -	Facebook – 2004 -	YouTube – 2005 -	Twitter - 2006 -	First iPhone – 2007 And a couple of years later: -	Instagram – 2010 -	First iPad – 2010 The shift from web1 (early internet) to web2 was possible because of those 3 key elements: -	Mobile devices (smartphones and later tablets) -	Multiple social media platforms -	Affordable mobile internet Notice that none of those was new in itself – we had mobile phones, Blackberrys, social media (remember MySpace?), and mobile internet for a few years prior to 2005. But during that 2005-2010 period, we reached kind of a ‘tipping point’ – the perfect combination of conditions for web2 to emerge. I remember vividly a session in 2006 when I was still at a university. We had to use the Internet on our phones (WAP) for one particular exercise – it was ridiculously expensive per every minute of being online and the experience was dreadful – barely usable for anything beyond sending emails or checking the news. This is a rather stark contrast to using a big touchscreen on my first iPhone around 2 years later (and being online 24/7). Why am I so focused on this ‘perfect storm’ of conditions required to properly launch web3? Because no single technology can be a catalyst for such a major shift. You must have the right combination of technologies, which supplement each other. Let me illustrate this – imagine trying to use Instagram if it existed back in, let’s say, 2002. First, you would have to always carry your clunky, low-quality digital camera with you… or a film camera ;-) Ok, you took the photo… now you have to go back home and connect it to your computer to download it (or take your film to be developed and scanned). Then finally you connect via your 56.6k dial-up modem to upload the photo. Is it possible? Of course. But it’s neither quick nor convenient. And that’s exactly why social media platforms and online content creation started growing exponentially after smartphones with built-in cameras and mobile internet became ubiquitous. We’re now at a similar point in web3. Early big players are already emerging – for example, you could see Yuga Labs as web3 equivalent of Facebook (just less evil;-) We see a lot of speculative investment and trading of crypto, NFTs, and anything AI-related – quite similar to the Dot Com Bubble at the beginning of the millennium. We’re in those rough, uncharted waters of the early adoption phase. This can only mean that the next phase – mass adoption – is just around the corner. Let’s look at those four core web3 technologies and the main reasons why I think that mass adoption will take place over the next few years. 1. Blockchain This technology sits at the core of web3. It adds decentralization and ownership to the next generation of the Internet. It shifts the power from big tech companies back into the hands of the users. Blockchain has been around for over a decade but only during the last major crypto bull run (2020-2021) we started seeing more widely spread interest in this technology. As I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this article – it’s no longer just speculative traders who are into it. Here’s one example – all Big Four consulting companies ( , , , and ) now have whole departments dedicated to blockchain technology and the metaverse. Deloitte KPMG EY PwC Here’s another one – University of Nicosia in Cyprus launched last year the . I participated in it and while I will be the first one to say that there’re plenty of improvements to make, I will also say that it is a very interesting experiment and it certainly feels like a step in the right direction (I will come back to the topic of education at the end of this article). first-ever course built fully on the blockchain Also, remember when El Salvador became the first country in the world to accept Bitcoin as a legal tender? Even though the crypto market has been pretty brutal in the last 12-18 months, they still managed to . pay off $800 million of foreign debt thanks to their investment in Bitcoin Yes, we’re still in the early days of blockchain adoption but these examples are from the last crypto bull run. Just imagine what will happen during the next one. 2. NFTs Yes, I realise that NFTs are based on blockchain technology but I feel that they deserve a separate mention. Many people just see them as yet another opportunity for speculative trading but the reality is that potential use cases of NFTs are almost infinite. Think about it this way: Bitcoin = money/transactions Ethereum = code/apps NFTs = everything else Here’s one great example – . The same could be done for land/property deeds or pretty much any other proof of ownership or authenticity. California DMV has recently started a trial of using NFTs as car titles Another example is the impact NFTs are already making on the art world and they’re feeding into pop culture. Initiatives like are only going to speed up this process. The Memes by Punk 6529 3. AI ChatGPT showed the masses how AI can be utilized by an average person right now… not at some unspecified point in the future. New AI-powered tools are appearing almost every day – copywriting, video editing, art creation (DALL-E, Midjourney, etc.) – you name it. ChatGPT is in some ways much better search engine than Google. Why? It gives you specific results based on your prompt… just like Google used to before it became crippled by ads, SEO, etc. For example – if I want a recipe for a vegan chocolate brownie, ChatGPT will give me just that. Meanwhile, Google will lead me to a cooking blog, where I have to read someone’s life story, skip through the ads, close pop-ups etc. before I eventually get to the recipe. I use AI tools every day. I’m not afraid of AI replacing us anytime soon. But I’m fairly certain that those who will not embrace it as a tool to supercharge their skills/productivity/etc. will be soon left behind. 4. AR, VR, XR Web3 is closely tied with the concept of the metaverse. Some form of a persistent VR or XR experience is at the core of how most people envision the metaverse (‘Ready Player One’ anyone?) Again – the tech itself is not exactly new. But we’re reaching a point when it will start gaining popularity at an exponential rate. Why? Facebook (sorry – Meta) is pumping a huge amount of resources into this tech. . Second-gen devices are supposedly already in the works. Whether you like Apple or not, there’s no arguing that they know how to make products extremely successful. They may not even be the first to the market but they know how to make their offer very attractive and have a very loyal (and huge!) customer base. I don’t necessarily expect their first-gen XR headset to be a mind-blowing success but the second or third model (likely out no later than 2025) will be probably as popular as Apple Watch. Apple is going to release its first high-end XR head in the next few months with a cheaper device to follow likely in 2024 There’re also various really exciting projects appearing in this space. For example, check out . Their app is still at quite an early stage but the potential is crazy! Wist Conclusion Ok, so what this all has to do with the proclamation of the end of the world as we know it? Think about how much the Internet has changed the world. How much it all changed again with the rise of social media and mobile internet. We’re on the brink of another shift of similar proportions. It will change how we work, do business with others, or just simply interact with others. It will create countless challenges but also opportunities. It will render some jobs redundant but will also create new ones. In the late 90s, businesses had to figure out how to establish their presence online (website, email, then SEO etc.). Around 2010, having a strong social media presence became at least equally, if not more important. We’re at the point where every business should at least start thinking about its presence in the web3/metaverse. The next few years will present some of the biggest challenges but also opportunities of this generation.

The World as we Know it is Over

Table of contents Step 1: Installing the PlaneSections Library Step 2: Creating Beam Model Step 3: Create Support Conditions Step 4: Create Loadings on the Beam Step 5: Visualizing the Created Beam Step 6: Plotting Shear force and Bending Moment Diagram Result and Conclusion For those of us taking structural mechanics and strength of materials courses, we all know how difficult it can get when trying to verify our analysis results. This gets more complicated when doing beam analysis, as we are trying to get what our beam element’s shear force and bending moment diagram will look like. In addition, when given a reinforced concrete design project, we also start by analyzing our beam elements, which transfer wall and slab load to columns and from column to foundation. These analysis and cross-checking processes are tedious and time-consuming when verifying our results by hand. Hence, for those of us with an interest in developing finite element tools for structural analysis, this article addresses how to create a simple beam model, and plot its shear force and bending moment diagram using a python library called planeSections. This library is created by csbloom which is built upon openseesPy. PlaneSections is a lightweight finite element beam bending library built on OpenSeesPy. The aim of PlaneSections is to make beam analyses easier, allowing for faster documentation of structural calculations. Being built on OpenSees, the structural results are reliable, and there is lots of room to create more complex models. https://youtu.be/4lgD6Mv7qaA The planeSection library has four core modules which are as follows: The Builder module is used to create the beam and beam elements. The beam class is the core class of the module, and the one the user interacts with the most. The Analysis module is used to analyze the beam using OpenSeesPy and document the results. The Diagram module is used to plot the beam model. The Postprocess module is used to plot the responses of the beam from the analysis, including force diagrams and deflections. For an in-depth understanding of how to customize the existing planeSection library classes and methods, check the documentation out. This is the question we will work on: Question: A Beam 25 m long is supported at A and B and is loaded as shown above. Sketch the SF and BM diagrams. Step 1: Installing the PlaneSections Library #install the PlaneSections library using the python pip coommand in google colab

pip install planesections Step 2: Creating Beam Model # we are importing the planeSections library
import planesections as ps

#we are importing the plotBeamDiagram method for drawing our beam #model

from planesections.core import plotBeamDiagram

# Define node locations, and support conditions
L = 25 # beam length in meters
#lets instaniate or create a beam object using newEulerBeam2D #function passing the length of the beam 
# as an argument
beam = ps.newEulerBeam2D(L)# we are importing the planeSections library
import planesections as ps

#we are importing the plotBeamDiagram method for drawing our beam #model

from planesections.core import plotBeamDiagram

# Define node locations, and support conditions
L = 25 # beam length in meters
# Let instantiate or create a beam object using newEulerBeam2D #function passing the length of the beam 
# as an argument
beam = ps.newEulerBeam2D(L) Step 3: Create Support Conditions # Define beam with support conditions or fixities
# key for support conditions or fixities  = {'free':[0,0,0], 'roller': [0,1,0], 'pinned':[1,1,0], 'fixed':[1,1,1]}


pinned = [1,1,0] # support condition  

# we invoke the setFixity method and pass the position of our beam # support as the first argument and #the support type as the second argument
beam.setFixity(0, pinned)
beam.setFixity(L*0.8, pinned) Step 4: Create Loadings on the Beam # Define point Loads and labels
Pz = -1000  # This represent 1kN in the downward direction
# we use the addLabel method of the beam object and the first argument specifies the distance from #starting length of our beam to #place our label and the label name as the second argument
beam.addLabel(0, label='A') 
beam.addLabel(10, label='E') 
beam.addLabel(20, label='B') 

# addVerticalload method defines a point load where the first argument is the position of the load, the argument is the load #magntude and the third argument I the label indicating the load 
#position on the beam

beam.addVerticalLoad(15, 2*Pz, label = 'D')

beam.addVerticalLoad(25, 3*Pz, label = 'C')



# Define distributed Loads
# the first argument is the point where the distributed load starts #and the second argument is where it #stops and the third argument is its magnitude

beam.addDistLoadVertical(0, L*0.4, 5*Pz) Step 5: Visualizing the Created Beam # drawing of the beam diagram using the plot plotBeamDiagram method #and our beam object as an argument
plotBeamDiagram(beam) Step 6: Plotting Shear force and Bending Moment Diagram # instantiate the analysis object
analysis = ps.OpenSeesAnalyzer2D(beam)
# Run the analysis
analysis.runAnalysis()


# Plot the ShearForce and Bending Moment Diagram
ps.plotShear2D(beam, scale = 0.0002, yunit = 'kN') 
ps.plotMoment2D(beam, scale = 0.0002, yunit = 'kNm') Result and Conclusion The picture above is the result from the textbook where I got the question which is similar to my plot as shown in step 6. The planeSections and openseespy library are flexible for adding more functionalities. let’s explore the power of numerical methods and create our own finite element software. Also published here.

Structural Analysis of a Beam with Python

Interview with Oren Langberg, CMO of Monkey League on Web 3 Gaming and the future of Play-to-Earn Game Ishan Pandey: Hi Oren. Welcome to our series “Behind the Startup.” Please tell us about yourself and the story behind ? Monkey League Oren Langberg: Thanks for having me! My name is Oren Langberg, and I am Head of Marketing & Partnerships at and . I am a lifelong gamer who has worked in various startups and listed companies over the last 15 years and has been at MonkeyLeague since the beginning. UnCaged Studios MonkeyLeague Titans found our studio from web2 gaming and crypto. They saw early on that web3 represented the future of gaming, and the potential decentralized gaming unlocks. Within the current market, they quickly recognized a large gap for AAA-quality games that were first and foremost fun and that there was a lack of quality sports games. With MonkeyLeague soccer, the first in a franchise of web3 sports games that will leverage the same digital game assets, MonkeyPlayers, several months from launching, the rest is history. : Vested Interest Disclosure The author is an independent contributor publishing via our . Be it through direct compensation, media partnerships, or networking, the author has a vested interest in the company/ies mentioned in this story. HackerNoon has reviewed the story for quality, but the claims hereon belong to the author. #DYOR brand-as-author program Ishan Pandey: Please tell us a little bit about Monkey League and your vision surrounding the emergence of GameFi 2.0? Oren Langberg: Imagine you combined the energy, excitement, and competitiveness of soccer with the strategic thinking of Chess. This is MonkeyLeague. A fast, turn-based arcade-style soccer game that’s easy to learn yet hard to master. I like to say think FIFA Street and Chess had a baby. Build your dream team of MonkeyPlayer NFTs, compete against real players, enter tournaments, and climb the League ranks. The MonkeyPlayer NFTs come with four core game skills, initial skill levels and max potentials you can improve through match play. So you will be able to level them up, and earn XP, which makes them more powerful in the game and increases in value. What’s awesome about MonkeyLeague is first, it's the first in a franchise of sports games that will leverage the same game assets, and second, owning a team and playing matches is just one layer in a vast interconnected, multi-role ecosystem that we are building around the games. So whether you want to play matches, own a stadium and land, be a coach, sponsor, tournament organizer, or player scout, there are many ways to play and earn. As far as GameFi 2.0, we have had a very clear vision from the beginning before this crypto winter made GameFi 2.0 trendy. The future rests on high production value, fun-first gaming with sustainable economies. The current state of play-to-earn with low production value games that use an earning mechanism as the primary incentive for people to play is unscalable and unsustainable. For web3 games to go mainstream, they need to build on the best of web2 games and add well-developed web3 components. All web3 game developers should ask themselves, “If there were no rewards, would I play this game”. Soul-bound tokens, or non-transferrable status achievements in the form of NFTs, will also have a major role in the future of web3 gaming. Ishan Pandey: The previous month has seen a sharp price decline followed by a comeback in the crypto markets as a whole. What does that mean for play-to-earn gaming and Web3 gaming companies? Oren Langberg: Although many solid web3 projects suffered in the worst way from this crypto winter, in the grand scheme, it's advancing the progression of web3. Survivors will need to evolve and adapt. Gone are the days when a few people in their mom’s garage could create a low-quality 2D game and attach a simple earning mechanism and succeed. The future of web3 gaming will be high production value, fun-first gaming with a balanced, skill-based rewards system. Play-to-earn as we know it won’t sustain itself. Ishan Pandey: Please elaborate on the concept of the soul-bound token system and how the soul-bound token ecosystem work? Oren Langberg: Sure, we see soul-bound tokens have a huge part in gaming which is why we have, together with Jeremy Paris from Delphi Labs, have mapped out a network or system of earned or achievable soul-bound tokens within the UnCaged ecosystem. Whereas one of our MonkeyPlayer NFTs can be traded or sold on the secondary markets, soul-bound tokens or NFTs will be non-transferable and earned through achievements. These soul-bound tokens then provide additional benefits only available to these holders. For example, within MonkeyLeague, owning a certain amount of teams would provide you a soul-bound token that would bring added benefits, such as a Stadium within the game. A Stadium that you could host matches and earn from. As we get closer, we will release many more details about our SBT system. Ishan Pandey: Recently, Solana and a number of other blockchain-connected platforms were looking into an apparent attack that appeared to have compromised at least 7,767 digital wallets, the computer programmes used to store traders' crypto tokens. From a regulatory standpoint, what changes are required in the industry to curb future attacks? Oren Langberg: Certain regulations will help in maturing the industry in many aspects. I think that crypto and blockchain itself are still relatively in their infancy and whether it's security or infrastructure, there are a lot of technological advancements that need to happen, and they are happening each and every day with new startups popping up to provide solutions and technology. What’s great about web3 is that people and communities come together to solve issues and provide solutions. Ishan Pandey: South Korea is the fourth-largest gaming market and a major adopter of blockchain technology. However, the nation has outlawed play-to-earn (P2E) blockchain games due to the inclusion of cryptocurrencies. According to you, how will this impact the industry at large? Oren Langberg: There’s definitely a lot of progressions and evolution that needs to happen. I believe as the crypto industry evolves and becomes more mature, it will be more massively adopted and less volatile. More regulations as well will bring more governments around. I also believe that as web3 gaming evolves from play-to-earn to more of fun first, play and Potentially earn, it will be less seen as a high-risk scheme and more as just gaming with a real currency behind it can be earned. Ishan Pandey: According to you, what next trends are we going to see in the blockchain and gaming space? Oren Langberg:  We’re definitely going to see more high-quality fun-first gaming, NFTs with more utility that is seen more as digital game assets. Don’t forget to share and like the story!

The Future of Web 3 Gaming with Oren Langberg

Let’s admit that most companies and enterprises have a common nightmare- a website/application with lethargic code! When it is about checking an issue under the hood, it is usually a glitch related to the code. Every web application, mobile application, and website has a code that sets up the wireframe of the final product. The slightest loophole in the code, or a bug, makes an application or website frail and undermines the capability to perform efficiently. Hence, to keep the codebase healthy, it is vital to perform a code audit for a smooth . software development cycle Software code auditing is a process that lets you stay ahead of the curve and curb the glitches that may emerge shortly. By running a code audit, the complete analysis of the project architecture, technologies, and tools used is done effortlessly! With a healthy codebase, it becomes easier for a business to catch up with the pace of new trends in the market. Since your curiosity about has brought you here, let’s read & understand how rails code audit helps in refining application code. ruby on rails code audit The Vitality of Ruby on Rails Code Auditing Code auditing is a vital part of the software development procedure because it helps in detecting flaws in an app/software in the early stages. It conducts a deeper analysis of the codebase, structure of the database, and infrastructure of the application server. By analyzing these pillars, gaining insights related to the entire product system along with the following becomes easy: The complexity of the code Stability of the code Prospective security vulnerabilities But how to know when is the apt time for running software code audit? Here’s the solution. You should always a source code audit under the following cases: When a product is expected to be outdated Spotting and fixing loopholes in the code Setting up scalability estimation Periodic review for checking the quality of software/application Every company or enterprise in the I.T realm emphasizes utilizing source code for ruby on rails application development. There are 5 different types of code reviews. Continue reading to know more about them. 5 Types of Software Code Review The following is a list of five code review types: Manual code review The manual code review sums up the introductory expression of the code structure. Through manual code auditing, one can determine if the code is written as per industry standards. This kind of code review is beneficial for MVPs and final products. Front-end code review The front-end code review aids in figuring out all issues/loopholes in the areas accountable for providing a friendly UX. Throughout the front-end code review, the entire focus remains on features like responsiveness and the design of the application. Backend code review To understand the complexity level of a code, no other method than backend code auditing is considered as best! This type of auditing helps to examine the stability of the code & potential threats. All outdated audit tools and technologies are thoroughly checked. Infrastructure code review As the name suggests, the infrastructure code review is all about determining the overall functionality of the server. Performing the infrastructural audit improves the speed of the site by optimizing the server and improving the speed of the site. The greatest advantage of performing infrastructure code review is that you not only save time but cut surplus expenses as well! Security code review To prevent security breaches & potential threats in the code, rail developers perform security code reviews. The prime aim for security code review serves the following functions: Detecting security vulnerabilities Eliminating surplus costs for bug fixation Creating code audit recommendation list Ruby Rails Code Auditing Core Steps can be done on point by following these four core steps. Ruby rails source code auditing #1 Manual analysis The manual analysis or the manual code study is about examining the functionality of the project, potential obstacles, and how to fix the issues in the codebase. It involves checking the website codebase for bugs, how the styles are connected, and if there are any code duplications. The manual analysis of a website or software is concluded by detecting and fixing internal errors. #2 Automated code analysis The purpose of automated code analysis is equivalent to its manual counterpart. The sole difference is the testing module. Through automated code analysis, the business logic of the code can be checked effortlessly! Not just this, but the automated analysis is worthy to fix programming glitches. #3 Version inspection Focusing on the versions of a language, framework, and library is a must because they often get outdated as new versions/upgrades are rolled out. Outdated versions invite security breach and to avoid it, a thorough inspection of the code becomes vital. For example, outdated code can restrict the functionality of libraries. Hence, inspecting the version and upgrading it becomes mandatory. #4 Issue prioritization The fourth step of prioritization is about listing all issues & suggestions to fix them. This stage comprises six steps listed below. Description of the issue Cause of the issue Impact of the issue Resolution of the issue Customer assurance Customer benefits Top Reasons To Perform A Code Audit Now, it’s time to answer the question of why do I need source code base auditing. T hese are 4 reasons to perform a software code audit: Figuring out loopholes Regardless of the age of the project/software, there’s always a possibility of finding loopholes that eventually make the codebase fragile. By performing a codebase audit, one can easily: Repair existing bugs Find & highlight potential bugs Determine outdated technologies By performing static analysis of code and using analysis tools, like Raxis, SonarQube, PVS-Studio, etc., detecting gridlocks in the code base gets simplified. Future scalability estimations While planning for the long run, an enterprise should ensure that no roadblocks emanate in the path of the product. At this point, code auditing can help in gaining insights related to the successful run of the software. Enhanced security Data security is crucial for all of us. However, there are several companies and enterprises that cannot shield sensitive credentials from unauthorized access. With a weak codebase, you cannot compromise the security of the project. By checking the code on time, not only the loopholes are detected but they’re fixed on time as well! This will make the software safer to use for everyone! Higher maintainability Blending the modern open-source software development guidelines with the codebase helps in reducing and eliminating additional costs for integrating obsolete technology. Keeping outdated tools at bay would aid in the growth of the product. Ruby on Rails Code Audit- Over To You For every software that’s willing to enter the market or is in the market already- the potential cyber threats are always lurking around to depreciate the performance. Hence, playing safe is the wise move. Acquiring code auditing services from professional companies can help your project/software sustain itself in the market efficiently. It will undergo various checks related to its security vulnerabilities, core performance, wireframe inspection, code quality, etc. Ultimately, timely code auditing would help in subtracting additional expenses and upgrading the project/application to the latest practices in the market. FAQs Why is code audit vital for my business? A code audit is vital for the business because it ensures the smooth performance of the software. Code auditing detects technical flaws related to the codebase, wireframe, and outdated technology. How many code reviews will be performed on my software? A code review is determined and performed after analyzing the requirement of the project/software. What will I get from a code audit? A code audit gives a detailed report related to the technical flaws and their solutions. It helps in gaining an understanding of the project/software’s current condition and suggests the apt up-gradation based on the report.

Assure Superb Quality of Ruby On Rails App Through Code Auditing

Smart contracts are applications deployed on the blockchain and executed by miners. Compared with today’s internet applications, the most distinguishing characteristic of the smart contract is the irreversibility of its execution. Since all historical input is stored and witnessed on the blockchain – execution results are therefore immutable. This makes smart contracts the perfect choice for implementing financial crypto tokens or NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Smart contracts do have limitations, however – and with the metaverse, such limitations are becoming increasingly clear. The metaverse introduces complicated computation tasks like game server logic and rendering beyond only account balance and NFT ownership management. For now, although your in-game token or characters can be stored on the blockchain, the decentralized world itself is still backed by centralized servers. Fat contracts conversely behave like traditional internet applications. Along with the decentralized and trustless nature of blockchain technology and support for real-time compute-intensive tasks, fat contracts add access to all services, even if they are not operating on a blockchain. Such capabilities come from Phala Network’s design of off-chain contract execution and make fat contracts the perfect complement of smart contracts. Smart contract limitations not solved by chain updating Before we dig into the reason why existing smart contracts cannot support complicated computation, I would first introduce a counter-intuitive fact about smart contract execution, and how they ensure the correctness of the execution results. The fact is that there is no promise that the execution results will be provided by a single miner. A miner is able to maliciously provide false results – like making one plus one equal to one. The current solution to this problem (adapted by almost all existing blockchains) is simple – they make all the input data and execution results public so that any miner can verify the execution. Only if there are more benign miners than malicious ones can they ‘vote’ and get the correct result. Such a trivial solution leads to the blockchain’s shortcomings – low performance and no privacy, brought about by the simple publish-and-verify design. Moreover, leaving all the computation to the on-chain miners can further limit the functionalities of the contracts. Any time-consuming tasks cannot be delivered since they can block the executors (i.e., miners) and further throttle the whole chain – and any urgent tasks cannot be delivered before they are confirmed by multiple blocks after seconds. It is worth noting that such problems cannot be solved with optimizations since they are rooted in the core design of the existing chains. Why fat contract is the perfect complement Fat contract features – low latency, high-performance, privacy, and freedom to re-use existing services. Compute-intensive tasks – by moving the execution of fat contracts to the off-chain secure workers backed by TEE (trusted execution environment), a fat contract can fully utilize the computing power of a single worker (such as a four-core CPU) or even multiple workers. This makes it capable of carrying out compute-intensive tasks. For example, we have successfully run an unmodified version of the open-source renderer in a Phala worker node to produce a GIF for an NFT. This process can be sped up by assigning the task to multiple workers. Blender Fat contracts can also run with Python machine learning libraries (numpy, scipy, PyTorch, etc.) to train DNNs (deep neural networks) and enable privacy for training data and models. The first machine learning model trained using a fat contract. Low-latency real-time computation – the response time for metaverse and game interaction should not exceed one second. However, traditional blockchain smart contracts cannot meet the requirement of low-latency services because they are executed at block intervals. By enabling direct access to our workers, fat contracts can achieve millisecond-level read responses, making it a perfect choice to deploy metaverse and game services. is a metaverse based on the Phala Network blockchain and is one of the best application cases. Only fat contracts have the ability to solve storage and high-speed processing of massive data, connect AR and distributed storage solutions, provide low-latency responses for user requests, and truly realize the vision of the web 3.0 metaverse. Phala World Bridging smart contracts and web 2.0 services. Phala believes web 3.0 should be an open and free world, and there is no reason to close its door to all the existing web 2.0 infrastructures. Fat contracts allow access to off-chain internet services by safely delegating complicated asynchronous requests for fat contracts. In our hackathon, we presented a of BTC price action. An HTTP request query for BTC prices was sent from an existing web service and then reported to a Telegram account through the corresponding HTTP API. All these operations are achieved within 100 LoC in the fat contract. Leveraging the Phala , such abilities can be used by all the existing smart contracts. demo bot bridge Also published here: https://dailyhodl.com/2022/02/15/why-fat-contracts-are-the-perfect-complement-to-smart-contracts/

Smart Contracts Limit the Metaverse – Fat Contracts Enable It

1. Hi! Thank you for joining us today. We’re quite intrigued by this project you’re building and would like to know more about your background and how you came up with the idea for . Nekoverse Hi! I am Leo Nguyen, thank you for having me on board. Well! I have to begin by saying I had quite the unique start to my career and got the opportunity to work with some exciting companies before starting one of my own. I have a Master of Science in Economic and Business Administration and Strategy and Entreprenuership. Soon after graduation, I began my career as an associate at Nexus Group, an M&A advisory firm. Then, I took upon the role of an associate at Velocity Ventures Vietnam, where I had the opportunity to closely work with budding startups. Following this, I had the wonderful opportunity to was a Business Intelligence Lead at DTX Asia. And, this is when, emerging digital asset and blockchain gaming space soon caught my attention. I was quite intrigued by the sheer number of possibilities with blockchain gaming and  explored quite a few emerging projects in this realm. This is when I realized that most projects were quick to adopt the play-to-earn model without actually providing an interesting game backdrop or satisfying gameplay for gamers. So, I came up with the idea for Nekoverse to adopt the play-to-earn model while still upholding the user experience and thrilling gameplays that gamers are used to. 2. Online gaming is a widely successful industry that has billions of players and thousands of successful titles. Considering this, how do you think the emergent blockchain-based games can carve out a niche for themselves here? What universally appealing factors do you think blockchain gaming brings to the table? I think the universally appealing factor for blockchain gaming is the play-to-earn model. Yes! The traditional gaming space is extremely successful, but for decades, gamers have not been able to directly monetize their gameplay. Blockchain gaming, on the other hand, effortlessly rewards gamers for the time spent on the platform and allows them to monetize their efforts in multiple ways. Moreover, blockchain-based gaming titles are community-owned. Users have a say in the development of the game and their progress along with in-game resources are permanently theirs. 3. Speaking of Nekoverse, please give us an insight into the backdrop and gameplay within this universe? How does Nekoverse stand out from existing NFT-Metaverse titles? Nekoverse is a Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG) that is housed on the Solana blockchain. The virtual world is governed by three mythical Gods who are the creators of the three different Neko elements. To enter the Nekoverse players are required to own a Neko NFT which acts as their character within the world. Each Neko has its unique attributes and when combined with elements produces new Neko breeds. Within the universe, players choose professions like farming, breeding, or necromancing to harvest resources and unlock rare items. Players are free to interact with others and explore the world on their own while engaging in PvE and PvP battles to win real monetary benefits. Nekoverse stands out from a majority of the NFT-gaming projects by providing not just a simple play-to-earn model but also an intriguing gaming experience to go with it. 4. The most interesting thing about your platform is the new token offering model that you’ve introduced. When the existing models like ICOs and IDOs have proven to be quite successful, what prompted you to introduce a new model? What loopholes, if any, do you see in the existing token offering models? The main problem with ICOs and IDOs is the fact that they’re not designed to directly benefit users who contribute to the platform. IDOs especially offer smaller token sales which tend to get easily oversubscribed for popular projects. The projects usually tend to limit the number of users with pre-arranged whitelists that only a select set of people can subscribe to. This inhibits a large number of community members from leveraging this opportunity and we wanted to create a change. This is why we’ve introduced the Initial Community Contribution Offering (ICCO) to capture the value of a community and redistribute it to benefit all active contributors. 5. Walk us through the ICCO token offering model and how it captures the value of the community. What is the eligibility criteria and who do you think benefits the most from this model? ICCO has four core token claiming concepts to ensure that all different types of contributors in the ecosystem benefit from their participation. The first of these concepts is the Contribute-to-Earn System and it is designed for users who contribute towards the development of the Nekoverse platform. These users are poised to receive real monetary benefits for their participation in the platform’s growth. The Pseudo Token concept is the second on the list and it rewards active participants of our Discord server with the Anima Spirit Fragment ($ASF) token. The third element in this new ICCO approach is the On-Chain token and it is how Nekoverse will distribute the native and official in-game token $ASG to its users. This coin can be exchanged on CEXs and utilized as a medium of exchange within the Nekoverse. As a final straw, we have the Conversion Mechanics between Pseudo Token & On-chain Token. Through this concept, Nekoverse provides a way for users to convert the pseudo-ASF tokens to ASG tokens. Our main aim is to distribute the ASG tokens to users who will actually use them within the gaming metaverse. This is why contributors are required to own at least 1 Neko NFT  and be verified members of the Discord server to become eligible for the ICCO token offering model. 6. Despite its immense success in the past few years, the blockchain-gaming space has miles to go before mainstream adoption. What significant problems do you think stand in the path of the industry’s growth? I think one of the main hindrances to the growth of blockchain gaming is the user experience on present-day blockchains. Players who are used to the webscale speeds and graphics with online gaming are struggling to make peace with the speeds on popular blockchain networks. In such cases, the gameplay and the gaming experience both suffer. Even simple games like CryptoKitties have managed to break the underlying blockchain networks with a sudden influx of users. So, for mass adoption to unfold with respect to blockchain gaming, there is a dire need for networks that solve the scalability issues and I believe chains like Solana have taken the right step in that direction. 7. Lastly before we go, what advice would you like to give investors eyeing the blockchain-gaming industry? With the pace at which blockchain gaming is growing, I believe in the near future decentralized play-to-earn titles will be at the forefront of the global gaming scene. So, I believe investors have an excellent opportunity to benefit from the growth of these early-stage projects today. Investing in the right kind of blockchain-gaming projects will definitely help investors claim a significant portion of the profit pie in the near future.

Introducing ICCO: An Interview With Nekoverse CEO Leo Nguyen Discussing DeFi’s Newest Token Model

At your CTO’s request, you recently started researching how to go about revamping or building your product’s notification system. You realized the complexity of this project around the same time as you discovered that there’s not a lot of information online on how to do it. Companies like LinkedIn, Uber, and Slack have large teams working just on notifications, but smaller companies like yours don’t have that luxury. So how can you meet the same level of quality with a team of one? This is the fourth and final post in our series on how you, the developer, can build or improve your company’s notification system. It follows the first post about identifying user requirements, the second about designing with scalability and reliability in mind, and the third about setting up routing and preferences. In this piece, we will learn about using observability and analytics to set your system and company up for success. Developing an application can often feel like you're building in the dark. Even after development, gathering and organizing performance data is invaluable for ongoing maintenance. This is where observability comes in—it’s the ability to monitor your application’s operation and what it’s doing. With close monitoring, observability is a superpower that allows developers to use various data points to foresee potential errors or outages and make informed decisions to prevent these from occurring. understand As you build your product, consider the implications of having complete observability built into your notification system. As a developer, you’ll need to identify and quickly resolve issues by understanding how your product is performing. In the bigger picture, observability ties your technological infrastructure to your overarching product and business objectives. These key insights will also help to scale the product and manage data as your business grows. Observability Use Cases You’re here because you want to build an application with a powerful notification system that can rival those of existing products. In this guide, you’ll learn why observability and building strong monitoring mechanisms are crucial. Here are four core observability use cases. Track and use logs for debugging Improve customer service and experience Holistic view of your product Analytics for business development Logs for debugging Telemetry logs are the backbone of an observability system. The more infrastructure you have, the more data there will be from each instrument and service. You need to be able to understand this data. Logs can provide additional context that allows developers to determine where or why certain issues might be occurring, and effectively, how to fix them. For example, if every API request to your notification system results in a specifically formatted log line, it becomes possible to scan those log lines for anomalies. Event logs of particular actions occurring in the system, like privileged access or settings changes, can sometimes shed light on unpredicted behaviors in the system. At the very least, you should have some kind of safety net or global catch to notify you when errors creep up. When users are unable to receive notifications, you can use various logs to determine what factor(s) prevented that notification from going through. If, for example, your app is unable to deliver messages to 20% of your users, logs would reveal that those same 20% of users are using your application on a specific device type. You’ll know right away that your application has a bug that prevents it from functioning properly on that device type and act accordingly. You can also update your system to prevent this issue from occurring for future users. Customer service Let’s say a user has contacted you to report that they have unsubscribed from emails but is still receiving them. Your customer care team should be able to note relevant logs or errors, communicate with the user to ensure a good relationship, and also feed that information to the developer team for potential resolution. Observability can also help you improve overall user experience, present and future. As you consider important data points to observe within your system, think about what might impact your product, through the lens of your customers. If you can see some metric that might impact user experience, work to improve it before it’s an issue. For example, do your time-sensitive notifications get delivered as quickly as they should? Are all messages being delivered only once? If you’re using multiple channels, are messages being routed correctly? specifically Additionally, if you’re using a third-party provider like SendGrid or AWS SES, you should absolutely observe connection health. If there’s a provider issue, you could notify your customers, such as through a status page, that notifications might not be working optimally. You might not be able to control the operational status of your providers, but you can still take action to maintain your customers’ trust. Holistic view of the product A proper observability environment should provide you with a holistic perspective of your application’s state. Based on usage and performance, you can clearly reason about how certain factors might affect your product. You can gather a real understanding of the rhythm of your notification system. You might see that your users are receiving fewer notifications at specific times in the day or year. How do you know if this is due to your application sending fewer notifications, or because they’re not getting delivered at all? With notifications, data can fluctuate drastically. Peaks in error rates can be cause for concern and require immediate engineering support, while fluctuations in send volume can be observed with caution to ensure that the application is sending the right amount of notifications. As you set up your observability, try to expose the data through user-friendly dashboards and interfaces, such as those that Datadog and Honeycomb offer. All of the collected data should be organized to provide clear insights on the application’s behaviors. Proper data visualizations are invaluable and should be tailored to more than just developer teams. For the customer service team, it is helpful to understand a specific user’s experience when something goes wrong. Likewise, commercial or marketing teams can glean insights for business development. Analytics and business development If your users trust that you can monitor your application efficiently and resolve issues quickly or even use data to prevent their incidence, you’ll build a strong foundation and customer base. How you organize your observability system should ideally connect to your service-level metrics, which should be recorded in your SLAs (service-level agreements) that you have with your users. The observability data will be more relevant to your business if it is connected to your SLIs (service-level indicators) and SLOs (service-level objectives). An observability system that monitors all varieties of resource consumption without this connection to user experience might not foster the type of growth you want. Tracking and analyzing data on how your users are interacting with your notifications can help drive business development opportunities. Link tracking, for one, is a core observability component within a notification system. Did the user click on your notification? When and how many times? Analyzing your observability data, and especially what you do with the resulting insights, is vital to further business growth. Your observability metrics will allow you to determine if the product is meeting business expectations. For instance, you can use observability data to make scaling decisions. If you want to scale, how might increases in volume affect your system? As you aim to understand the signals from the noise in all of your observable data, every signal you find needs to drive meaningful change. This is where you will find opportunities for further development. Making Your Notification System Observable Once you know how to use data to effectively monitor your application and make informed decisions, where do you start? The ultimate goal is to design your observability environment so that it is able to understand data, compare the data between various channels and infrastructure, and make it actionable. There’s a way to structure data to make it more useful to engineers, customer service, and business development teams. Making sense of this data requires two key measures: the and . correlating normalizing events data Correlation illustrates how different events are connected to each other and how they are connected to different users. In a notification system, this means that every outbound message, the receipt and opening of a message, and every click on the notification are measured in the ways they are statistically related to one another. Normalization refers to how we understand data points from different sources or channels and record them in a way that makes them comparable. That means re-scaling the data so that it all varies on a . For example, how would data from email notifications from SendGrid compare to SMS notification data from Twilio? These are not only different companies, but also entirely different channels. similar scale Correlation and normalization of data allow you to have a more complete understanding of how your product’s notifications are performing, both in general and in relation to one another. You would then be able to filter through data and for example, find all events related to one user. This would include all email, SMS, direct message, and push notifications regardless of how and where the user received them. You can also filter through the data to find all emails sent out on a specific date under certain conditions, like for multiple users or in specific regions. Ultimately, if you’re working with several providers for your notification system, correlating and normalizing data points will be a vital step to achieving observability. Observability tips for serverless notification systems Your setup for an observability system will depend on your tech stack. For the sake of this example of a serverless notification system, we’ll use AWS DynamoDB and Lambda. Generally, observability boils down to metrics, logs, and traces—and how you manage them. Since we’re using AWS DynamoDB and Lambda, is a great tool that provides built-in monitoring in connection with many other AWS services. CloudWatch collects both custom logs and those of other AWS services, as well as infrastructure metrics. AWS CloudWatch At Courier we import these metrics and logs into , which aggregates everything on a dashboard. Datadog can be integrated with both and , as well as hundreds of other services. Datadog DynamoDB Lambda In a notification system using Lambda and DynamoDB, you should monitor all default performance metrics such as the number of functions getting called, the number of rows being modified, and so forth. Some of the notification-specific metrics not already mentioned here include latency, error rates, and request rates. For DynamoDB in particular, it is valuable to monitor access patterns, such as inputs and outputs, in order to . A tool like can help identify and analyze these access patterns. avoid hot keys CloudWatch Contributor Insights AWS Lambda can automatically capture logs and then connect them to AWS CloudWatch with the . Through this API, extensions can subscribe to function logs, extension logs, and the Lambda platform logs for events and errors. Datadog can import these as well. Lambda Logs API For logging DynamoDB activity, AWS offers . All API calls for DynamoDB are captured as events. You can search through the event history, or you can for ongoing event delivery to an AWS S3 bucket. This allows for an extended record of events and you can integrate these logs to CloudWatch. CloudTrail create a trail If you’re using a tool like Datadog, you might forward your CloudWatch logs and metrics to Datadog using a . If you’re also using in your tech stack to quickly process streaming data, you can use their to forward logs to Datadog as well. Forwarder Lambda function Kinesis Firehose delivery stream Important logs to track There are many vital metrics and logs to observe in a notification system. Some, already mentioned in this article, include the sending of notifications, receipt and opening of notifications, and any clicks on notifications. Other important ones include deliverability, open rate, and conversion rate. You’ll also want to note the channel and provider for each notification, such as Twilio for SMS. You are inherently looking for two different things. The first is how your notification system is operating so that you can resolve potential bugs and strive for improvement. The second is how successful your notifications are in engaging with your users. Any log or metric that might help you define those two components will be useful. Finally, traces can greatly help understand the context of logs or metrics. Traces track requests from beginning to end through all of the components in your tech stack. Tracing is especially key when your tech stack involves several intertwined systems, as it can help identify bottlenecks between those systems. Traces are normally integrated through logs, such as a unique ID for each request. One idea would be to attribute each operation in DynamoDB and Lambda to a specific notification that is sent by a specific user. Conclusion If you’re building your own notification system, observability is vital for both maintaining and scaling your product. It is a preventative measure that can improve the performance and health of your system. Whatever the relevant observability metrics may be for you, the data should be measurable, actionable, and meaningful. Remember that it’s what you do with your data that impacts your business the most. This piece taught us about the necessity of observability and analytics to monitor the functioning and performance of your in-house notifications system, as well as the advantages it provides for its future ability to scale. This is the last post in this series about how to build your own notifications. Soon, we will release an eBook so that you can access all of this information together and use it as a reference as you get building. To stay in the loop about the upcoming content, subscribe below or follow us ! @trycourier

Setting Up Notification Systems to Observe and Analyze Your Application

At Koyeb, our mission is to provide the fastest way to deploy applications globally. We are building a platform allowing developers and businesses to easily run applications, a platform where you don't need to think and deal with the resiliency and scalability of your servers: . a serverless platform Ironically, a serverless platform is actually full of servers. As a cloud service provider, we operate the infrastructure for you and abstract it as much as possible. The initial technological choices you make as a cloud service provider are crucial. Not only do they determine the features you can develop, but also the resiliency and scalability of your entire platform. We decided to build our own serverless engine, one that would not be limited by existing implementations. The first version of Koyeb was built on top of Kubernetes and allowed us to quickly build a working cloud platform. After a few months of operating with this version, we decided to move user workloads from Kubernetes to a custom stack based on Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma. We wrote this blog post to explain why we moved from Kubernetes to a custom stack to power our users' serverless workloads. This post is written from our point of view as a cloud service provider. Koyeb's requirements: Fast, Global, Secure, Scalable Building on top of the right abstraction layer The limits of Kubernetes The stack behind Koyeb Serverless Engine: Nomad, Firecracker, Kuma on BareMetal... and Kubernetes Koyeb's requirements: Fast, Global, Secure, Scalable Before diving into the technicals, let me outline the requirements which led us to where we are today. At Koyeb, we are building a next-generation serverless platform that should be the fastest way to deploy applications globally. There are four core pillars we want to achieve: : We want the platform to be quick, both when you deploy your application and when the application is running. We believe deploying a software update should take minutes or ideally seconds. No developer wants to wait dozens of minutes before an upgrade is deployed, especially when working on development or pre-production environments. Execution should also be fast and your workloads should not be slower in the cloud than on your laptop. Fast : For businesses, deploying globally is rarely optional in 2021, and it is definitely not an option for us as we have customers all around the world. Whether you're operating a global B2C brand or a B2B company, if you have users all around the world, you need a simple and effective way to operate in multiple regions. Compliance and performance are the two drivers here. Global : As a cloud service provider, security is crucial, especially as we operate a multi-tenant environment. Isolation between customers should be reliable, both at the host and network level. From a user perspective, security should be built-in and should not be an option. Secure : To be competitive on the market, we need to offer a scalable platform for our end-users and we need to build a platform able to support both your growth and our own growth. We've already experienced the pain of struggling with growth . To better support our customers all around the world, we want to be able to run on different cloud service providers depending on locations and to respect sovereignty requirements. Scalable in a previous life Now that we have a list of requirements, let's move to the technical options. Building on top of the right abstraction layer The options We considered all levels of abstractions to build a full-featured platform that would be able to support our mission and requirements. We had roughly 4 options, below is the list sorted from the highest level of abstraction to the one where you deal directly with hardware: : Building on top high-level function and container primitives of cloud providers Cloud providers primitives : Using Kubernetes to power our user workloads Kubernetes : Building a purpose-built solution, on top of Virtual Machines or BareMetal servers VMs or BareMetal : Operating our own physical infrastructure and network (aka racking BareMetal machines) Racking Our own users face the same kind of options to deploy and operate their production applications. Most of them will rule out options and as these are irrelevant for most businesses nowadays. 3 4 We believe anybody who is not in the infrastructure business should try to build on top of high-level providers like Koyeb, aka option 1. Our first choice: Kubernetes to the rescue We quickly ruled out racking servers (option 4). We've been in the business of racking and even building BareMetal servers but there are now enough options to pick from, at least for our current needs. In 2021, building software usually involves relying on a cloud service provider. We are no exception to that as we are . before building a cloud service provider on top of other cloud service providers We also ruled out building on top of high-level abstractions of cloud service providers (option 1) since it doesn't provide the control we need. This option would probably allow us to develop features faster, but our platform would suffer from the same product limits as these abstractions. Since our goal is to remove these limits to improve our users' deployment experience, this choice would be counter-productive. With this in mind, we started to build on top of Kubernetes, believing this would be the right abstraction layer to quickly build a reliable platform meeting our requirements. Spoiler alert, after several months we decided to build a purpose-built solution instead... The limits of Kubernetes At Koyeb, we have been operating Kubernetes clusters for two years now and, once we started to support custom user functions and containers, we began to see limits. Here is a broad overview of the limits we started to hit: Let's start with the most common complaint you might hear: it's complex. In our case, we need to be able to extend the core. Even when operating a cloud platform is your business, understanding how Kubernetes works and why it was implemented this way is hard. Complexity: Kubernetes provides some options to isolate multi-tenant serverless workloads. We first worked with , but the performances were disappointing. We decided to explore using Firecracker but running Firecracker on Kubernetes was experimental. Security: gVisor User workloads on Koyeb need to be able to run in multiple zones. Kubernetes doesn't support multi-zone out of the box. Implementing multi-zone with Kubernetes requires deploying a full cluster per zone, with a dedicated control plane for each data center. Global and multi-zone deployments: Kubernetes is known to have limits in terms of the number of nodes in a cluster, which means that multi-cluster support needs to be implemented really quickly when operating at scale. Scalability: Release cycles are really short, which is great but difficult to manage in production. Having to upgrade every two months, which means testing and validating that the upgrades do not break the production quickly becomes a full-time job. Upgradability: Kubernetes clusters tend to have . On each hypervisor, Kubelet uses between 10% and 25% of RAM which is a non-negligible cost. Spoiler alert: We're more around 100MB with our new architecture. Overhead: considerable overhead Kubernetes: a generalist orchestration platform Back in the early 2010s, the hype was more around than Kubernetes as Docker didn't even exist, but Kubernetes is the same kind of project: an all-purpose orchestration platform. OpenStack In our experience as a cloud service provider, when you work with large general-purpose software projects, you tend to hit the same issues: Once you start scaling or trying to develop advanced features on such a platform, you need to fully understand the internals. You spend a lot of energy trying to follow upgrades that might not be relevant to you, break your integrations, and you suffer from decisions you have no control over Don't get me wrong, Kubernetes definitely helped us develop quickly the first generations of the Koyeb engine. The ability to deploy pre-written Helm Charts is a powerful tool to deploy existing software. As a cloud service provider, we knew we would eventually hit the limits and would either need to deep dive into Kubernetes and contribute inside its core or design the Koyeb platform differently... The stack behind Koyeb: Nomad, Firecracker, Kuma on BareMetal... and Kubernetes With all these limits in mind, we started to re-design the platform to support our goals. After some testing, we decided to build our serverless platform using a combination of powerful technologies. Enter Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma on BareMetal... and Kubernetes. Overall architecture To understand why we combined these technologies, let's take a step back. On the Koyeb platform, there are two key parts: The is composed of the Go APIs behind and related databases. It receives the API calls and handles all the logic to effectively deploy the app on the Koyeb Data Plane. It needs to run 24x7x365 with requirements pretty similar to those of users' on Koyeb. Koyeb Control Plane app.koyeb.com The hosts the deployed users' applications. It's the core of the platform, it needs to support running millions of containers across thousands of hypervisors. It's the most demanding part of the platform. Koyeb Data Plane On each hypervisor of the data plane, there are 4 major elements: The , Firecracker, effectively executing the applications, ensuring multi-tenants workloads are isolated and secured in a performant fashion. container runtime and virtualization technology The , composed of Kuma and Envoy, provides the service mesh and discovery engine which enable seamless private networking between services. networking technology The , Nomad, which performs all provisioning operations when a deployment happens or scaling events happen. orchestration engine The , CoreOS on High-End BareMetal servers, where the applications run with the lowest possible overhead. operating system and servers And the Control Plane runs on... Kubernetes. As we cannot run the Koyeb Control Plane on Koyeb to avoid circular dependencies, we run the APIs on top of Kubernetes. Diving into Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma Nomad for Container Orchestration is a workload orchestration engine that can be used to manage containers and non-containerized applications across clouds. Nomad lets us deploy and manage the containerized applications that are running on the platform. It provisions Firecracker microVMs and communicates with containers to manage and run the containers. Nomad We selected Nomad to do the orchestration because compared to Kubernetes it is: Easily extendable. Runtimes can easily be customized and integrating with Firecracker was seamless using a custom nomad driver. Simpler to use. The scope of the project is way smaller, it doesn't cover everything from runtime to networking and that's just what we needed. Multi-zone out of the box, simplifying how we make serverless workloads global. Easy to implement control plane at the region level, reducing the overhead of per-region Kubernetes clusters. Has a smaller footprint and is easily scalable. Firecracker for Virtualization is a lightweight virtualization technology that was purpose-built to securely and efficiently run multi-tenant serverless workloads. We needed a virtualization technology that would keep our clients' workloads secure and isolated and provide fast boot-up times for new instances without compromising performances. That's exactly what Firecracker does. Firecracker We've written about in a previous blog post if you want to dive deeper. Firecracker MicroVMs The key benefits are: Multi-tenancy security and isolation, High density on bare metal machines thanks to low overhead, Fast boot-times for autoscaling microservices and functions There are a few more benefits that we go over in detail in our post . 10 Reasons Why We Love Firecracker MicroVMs Kuma for Service Mesh Control Plane is an open-source service mesh built on top . It is a control plane that connects distributed services running on Kubernernets and VMs. Kuma Envoy We built Koyeb to host distributed and microservice architectures. Distributed architectures need a way to connect the services that run within them. A service mesh is the dedicated infrastructure layer that is responsible for the secure, quick, and reliable communication between services in containerized and microservice applications. For more information about service meshes, check out our post on . service meshes and microservices Kuma is a rare service mesh that is not tightly coupled to its workload scheduler. This distinguishes it from alternative service meshes like Linkerd and Istio, which only work on Kubernetes. Moreover, Kuma supports multi-zone and cloud-agnostic out of the box. The Kuma control plane allows us to secure, observe, and manage the microservice network. Next to each service instance on Koyeb is an Envoy Proxy. These proxies form the data plane, which connects to the Kuma control plane. Proxies are configured from the control plane, meaning the hostnames your instances should know for DNS, their retry policies, and more are all communicated to the proxy from the control plane. Kuma and Envoy provide us with a great option for private networking, especially because they: Are platform-agnostic, Support multi-region and multi-cloud deployments, Can run in a zero-trust network environment thanks to native TLS encryption and mTLS authentication, Provide natively secure communication between services. The Koyeb Serverless Platform is Purpose-Built We built Koyeb to be a secure and powerful serverless platform that is developer-friendly. Providing this in a secure and resource-efficient manner. Moving from Kubernetes to a customized stack of Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma enables us to provide the serverless experience we envision for the serverless future. serverless experience entails running multi-tenant workloads on bare metal servers You can use Koyeb to host web apps and services, Docker containers, APIs, event-driven functions, cron jobs, and more. At the moment, the platform has built-in Docker container deployment and git-driven deployment is on the way! Discover the serverless experience and by today. Also, feel free to join us over on . signing up Slack And if you want to help build a serverless cloud service provider and dive deeper into these technologies, ! we’re hiring

Building The Koyeb Serverless Engine: Why We Moved From Kubernetes to Nomad, Firecracker, and Kuma

When it comes to creating a niche blog from scratch it can be challenging to attract visitors to visit your content and scale your content output alongside your marketing goals. In this post, we’ll take you through how we’ve brought sustainable traffic to our new blog going from zero visits when the blog was first launched in October 2020 to over 2,500 monthly visitors in December 2020 by creating articles to attract potential B2B SaaS customers. Whilst this may not be the largest increase for a newly created blog, our traffic is highly relevant to our target audience and has attracted authors and thought leaders as contributors who have led teams at IBM, Microsoft and have authored books on educational topics our users value. Top Tips For Bringing Visitors To Your New Blog 1. Discovering Hidden Content Traffic Wins Did you know that your organisation may already have the copy to support high traffic generating blog posts? It is highly possible that valuable content is currently being hidden by your site structure or by simply working in a siloed manner away from your technical teams. As more and more SaaS companies move to use subdomains provided by a third-party tool to host their technical documentation, help articles and best practise guides, these resources are being under-served to potential new users that would find a lot of value in this long-form content. From prior experience, documentation published to a subdomain doesn’t tend to rank as well as content migrated to a subfolder. In addition to this if your help centre or docs library is poorly designed you may even end up taking what new users that do reach you organically away from being able to trial your product. To combat under-serving content every so often, we’ll audit and review all of our owned content for new organic rankings occurring on posts that are located on a subdomain by using Ahrefs to review all available opportunities. When it came to populating our newly created blog migrating existing ranking content was essential, the articles that were migrated quickly ended up being our most viewed blogs as the queries they were answering were not only related to our service but also served to help external users of the open-source software we’re built upon. 2. Evaluate Internal Resources For Technical Content Creation As a content marketer responsible for creating blogs and articles that may be unrelated to our preferred field it can often be necessary to communicate internally with the rest of your technical team to discover that they have relevant experience around the topics you are keen to rank your blogs for. By having knowledge of what topics your developers and engineers are passionate about it can become much easier to close your content gap against your competitors. Getting your wider team on board with writing and brainstorming content gives you a much better chance of ranking for niche keywords then if you were to outsource your content creation or try to hack together something “good enough” for the topic you’ve targeted. In addition to this, it is important to make note of what internally used documents have been created to support our use of new technologies as often these documents could easily be broken down into new blogs themselves for their external technical value. To help keep track of these we have a content calendar where anyone can add in new ideas so as we work on projects or research tasks a supporting note can be added and assigned to the person who has the most knowledge of the subject for them to create marketing content around. By repurposing “hidden” or under-served content and internal resources you can provide your new blog visitors with masses of value by simply centralising your content and auditing your otherwise forgotten written output on a regular basis. It is especially important to conduct an internal content audit prior to creating a new blog or migrating an existing outdated blog to a new hosting platform. You may also be under serving your video content, you can use screen recorder to capture snippets of content to embed within your blog or convert into Gifs to make your blog content far more engaging. 3. Identification of Low Hanging Fruit For Fast Ranking Opportunities As previously mentioned, we use Ahrefs to also help us discover and target low difficulty high volume keywords and long-tail keywords to assist getting our blogs to rank faster. The Ahrefs keyword explorer is a great resource for discovering related keywords to the main topic you are writing about. Often FAQ-style long-tail keywords have a decent search volume and a very low difficulty score which make for ideal subsections on larger articles. By implementing this strategy as we write content we’ve seen blogs start attracting organic sessions in as little as a week after publishing. The traffic has proved sustainable and many of these blogs have served us with relevant sessions every month since they were launched. 4. Evaluate SEO Strength As You Write As well as Ahrefs we also use SEMrush to help not only improve the on-page SEO of existing pages but we also use their Google Docs plugin the SEO Writing Assistant as we are writing new articles and landing pages. This add-on makes sure that whatever we write has an improved chance of ranking before it goes live. Their checker works on the basis of four core attributes; Overall SEO strength for your target keyword. Readability to vet how legible this is for your target readers. Tone of voice to make sure that the article sounds consistent throughout the piece. Originality - which serves as a built-in plagiarism checker to make sure that you are not unknowingly duplicating the work of another author. The addon takes all of these factors into consideration to produce an overall score that helps you gauge how strong your content is as it is being written. One of the most useful attributes of the tool is the recommended keywords section which helps to indicate missing subsections and additional descriptive terms to support the topic you are writing about. I also find that the readability score is quite intelligent as this tends to adjust based on the average reading level of the top pages ranking for your term, so the difficulty level varies based on the average knowledge level of the target reader. These two attributes are helpful as you wouldn’t want to write an overly simplistic article for a reader who is a senior decision-maker of a company eligible for your product/service. The checker also provides a nice baseline for word count. There are many SEO myths around word count including the notorious “longer is better for ranking purposes” whereas the score bases their recommended word count on previously published articles and advises the author not to risk exceeding the word count and losing relevance for their piece. By analysing the context of previously ranking copy you’ll often find that the most suitable word count is going to support quality over sheer quantity of text. 5. Buyers Guides - But Make It Evergreen The first of our originally written guides that started bringing in organic traffic was a buyers guide on comparable software solutions that largely were not in direct competition with our services. By writing guides that draw up the pros and cons of tools and services you enjoy using, which can be updated each year you can bring in long term traffic and build upon your initial article over time. By focusing on creating lists around tools that have consistently high levels of search volume year on year you can minimise the effort you end up spending on creating brand new blogs that are only effective for netting organic traffic for around six months or less. You can also get ahead of other comparable guides by including newer less established solution providers in your review. By picking a provider that is trending on Product Hunt and giving their tool an honest evaluation you are more likely to see them share your article with their network due to the fact they are less used to being featured and as a startup, they are likely tired of having to pay to be included in these types of comparison lists. Long-form informative content bringing together real reviews of the top technology providers assists users in getting to know your brand indirectly off the back of solutions they are already aware of but may not know that you provide complementary functionality for. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this article, once you’ve got your existing content properly audited and new content is created with optimisation in mind from it’s first iteration you can then focus on other marketing channels to share your content, whether that is through email marketing, advertising placements or on social media. Eleanor Bennett is a digital marketing specialist at the centralised log management platform & hosted ELK service . She writes on technology & marketing, with a special focus on informative pieces to help IT decision-makers consider tools and software to secure their operations and scale for business growth. Her research has previously been featured in the Financial Times, The Huffington Post & Dzone across a range of topics. Author Bio: Logit.io

How to Get Organic Traffic to a New Niche Blog

Leveraging the affiliate marketing channel is a powerful function of the sales funnel. When managed correctly, it can deliver exceptional and immediate returns while growing brand equity over time. Adopting the right strategies and learning how to track the progress of your affiliate marketing campaign is integral to running a successful and sustainable program. Affiliate marketing is a highly effective tool to integrate and work in tandem with your existing marketing efforts. It’s an ideal channel for SMEs since it is incredibly cost-effective, transparent, and easy to control. Low upfront costs allow brands to explore and try different strategies with minimal risk, based on a cost per acquisition (CPA) model. Working alongside a reputable affiliate marketing network increases the growth potential. Affiliate marketing networks help facilitate connections and provide many other services to both publishers and advertisers. These include reporting tools, tracking technology, training material, and payment management. Affiliate marketing is highly targeted and guarantees a high return on your investment. A successful affiliate marketing campaign is not only based on making smarter connections with content partners but it is also based on the foundations which make up the campaign, as demonstrated below: Guarantee your data feed is high quality Ensure your offering is enticing Validate your tracking This article will cover the four core elements to help you build and manage an affiliate campaign to empower your eCommerce growth. The Metrics As with most strategies, measuring a set of objectives indicates the success of a project and frames its learnings. Your affiliate marketing campaign is no different. You can assess the information through two sets of measurements - . quantitative and qualitative Both are extremely valid at providing you with key information to improve and build upon the outcome of your campaign. Together they deliver a 360 view of what activity to continue, what to stop, and what to start doing. Understanding Quantitative Measurements Quantitative measuring is the analysis of empirical data to decipher the success of a certain campaign. It is highly specific and uses hard data to measure against a set of objectives. Quantitative measurements can be broken down into the following metrics: Cost per Lead This metric (also known as ) measures how cost-effective your campaign is when generating new leads. CPL The purpose of this metric is to provide your team with a numerical value to work out how much to spend on acquiring new leads. CPL can be worked out by promotional spending divided by the number of leads generated. However, as a business, you need to factor in additional costs associated with running a CPL campaign, such as resources for servicing inbound leads and optimizing specialized landing pages to improve the lead generation journey. Cost per Acquisition Cost per acquisition (or CPA) is the hallmark payment method for the affiliate channel. It offers the ability to only pay for a piece of activity that has generated an actual event of a sale, e.g., a product or service. A CPA campaign provides maximum transparency to the brand and has low barriers to entry for brands that are not entirely au fait with affiliate marketing. The CPA model provides an added confidence and assurance that you will not be wasting money. Incremental Revenue Incremental revenue is the profit made from an increase in sales. This can be attributed to the additional sales generated by a certain product or service from a specific marketing campaign. The advent of mobile means the user journey has multiple touchpoints across several devices making, quantifying incremental revenue difficult. Incremental revenue is attributed to the additional sales generated by a certain product or service from a specific marketing campaign. Thus the simplest way to measure incremental revenue is the additional revenue generated by a specific piece of activity that you would not have otherwise generated. For example: If you generate £100,000 through your standard practice, i.e., TV ads, display campaigns, and PPC campaigns, and add an affiliate campaign to your marketing efforts generating £110,000 - £10,000 of this can be considered incremental revenue as you did not have this before starting your affiliate marketing campaign. In practice, quantifying the incremental revenue is a lot more complex than the example we’ve laid out. You will need to analyze qualitative metrics to gain a truer reflection of the incremental revenue. However, this should provide a good overview and a basic understanding. Click-through Rate Also abbreviated to CTR, this metric refers to the number of clicks merchants receive through their adverts. This metric can add value by showing you the impact of your creative call to action in driving prospects to click the link and pass through to your site or landing page. You can optimize CTR by improving and testing your creative ideas and call-to-action triggers to increase conversion rates. Conversion Rate This metric indicates how effective your traffic is at leading to a conversion on your site. A rule of thumb is to divide the sales by traffic (clicks) then multiply by 100. ROI (Return on Investment) This is the most important metric when assessing how effective and worthwhile your marketing campaign is. ROI is the profit divided by the total cost. It is important to benchmark your ROI figures across your marketing channels to understand which is the at driving revenue with the minimum cost. most effective How to Stress Test Your Affiliate Campaign Meeting your KPIs by utilizing both qualitative and quantitative metrics is imperative to a successful campaign. Go one step further by stress testing your campaign. Below are some of the metrics which can help ensure you are tracking the progress of your affiliate campaign: New Customer vs. Existing Customer This metric allows you to see what proportion of your sales are being generated by existing customers and what level of incremental customers the affiliate channel is bringing in. This can also be viewed at a granular level by monitoring which specific affiliates drive the most ‘new customers’ for you. Average Order/Basket Value This metric indicates the average amount a customer is spending per transaction. It is a very useful metric to track if you are aiming to increase the basket value. You can use tactics such as stretch and save vouchers or bundle products. This metric can also be used to benchmark the effectiveness of your affiliate campaign vs. other channels. Affiliate Behaviour Affiliates typically work on a CPA model; therefore, it is imperative you provide them with key information to promote your products. This information should include the company overview, your product range, and hero products, including the following metrics: Commission rates Average order/basket value Terms and conditions on methods they can and cannot use for promotion, e.g., PPC bidding Once your campaign is live, it is advised that you continuously engage with the affiliates and track the performance of your affiliate partner base using the reporting suite available. Affiliate Sales Variations The performance of your affiliate campaign can vary from week to week. The affiliate channel is not exempt from external factors like the weather or trading policies; however, insights can help manage sales variations through analysis of the affiliate's performance and the overall performance of the channel. An increase in competition and changes in commission rates can also impact the performance of your campaign. The winning strategy to adopt when running an affiliate campaign is to ensure you plan your activity as far in advance as possible. Agility is also a key factor, as you can make tactical decisions when short-term opportunities present themselves. Do Vanity Metrics Matter? Yes and no. The number of impressions and visits does not have an impact on your campaign in terms of costs. However, vanity metrics can be used as a good indicator of how engaging your creative and content is to drive people to your site. Vanity metrics also play a key role in identifying specific affiliates who complement your brand and affiliate strategy, as well as identifying affiliates that have dropped off the radar and need to be re-engaged. Summary So, we have covered the basic cornerstones surrounding the metrics used to measure the performance of an affiliate marketing campaign. Many of these metrics can be used to measure the success of a digital marketing campaign but understanding the fundamentals can significantly optimize your affiliate activity. To get to the stage where you can effortlessly measure the progress of your campaign, it is integral that you clearly outline your objectives from the start. Consider this three-step approach: 1.      Purpose What is your objective for the campaign you want to run? Is it to increase sales volume? Average basket value? Or to acquire new customers? Answering these questions will inform the metrics you need to measure so you can monitor the success of your campaign. 2.      Tracking is the key Ensure you track the key events your objectives are based on. Using an affiliate network can help deepen your understanding and optimize the performance of your campaign on a granular level. 3.      Reports are your friend Once you have outlined the objectives of your campaign and have your tracking in place, use the reporting suite to track the progress of your campaign activity, optimizing all elements constantly to ensure you are achieving KPIs and delivering great ROI.

How to Track the Progress of Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign

Every dog owner wants to find the perfect friends for their new puppy. Now we have an app for that! You can browse through various puppy profiles and swipe right or left to find your new puppy friend. Setting up puppy playdates has never been easier! Ok, not really... But we do have a wacky demo app built with , , , and (a hosted GraphQL backend from ). React Material-UI Apollo Client Slash GraphQL Dgraph In this article we'll explore how I built the app and also look at some of the basics of the technologies I used. Ready to the fun? unleash Update: On April 16th, 2021, Slash GraphQL was officially renamed Dgraph Cloud. The information below still applies, and you can still build the app as described. Overview of the Demo App Puppy playdate app Our app is a Tinder clone for puppy playdates. You can view our puppy profiles, which are pre-generated seed data I included in the database. You can reject a puppy by swiping left or by clicking the X button. You can show interest in a puppy by swiping right or by clicking the heart button. After swiping left or right on all the puppies, your results are shown. If you're lucky, you'll have matched with a puppy and will be well on your way to setting up your next puppy playdate! Check out the ! You can also . demo app here see the code on GitHub In this article we'll walk through setting up the schema for our app and populating the database with seed data. We'll also examine how the puppy profiles are fetched and how the match updates are done. The Architecture As noted above, the four core technologies behind this app are , , , and . React Material-UI Apollo Client Slash GraphQL I chose React because it's an excellent frontend library for developing UIs in a declarative way with reusable components. Material-UI helped provide the building blocks for the UI components. For example, I used their , , , , and components along with a couple icons so that I had some base component layouts and styles to use as a starting point. Button Card CircularProgress FloatingActionButton Typography I used Apollo Client for React to facilitate communication between my frontend components and my backend database. Apollo Client makes it easy to execute queries and mutations using GraphQL in a declarative way, and it also helps handle loading and error states when making API requests. Finally, Slash GraphQL is the hosted GraphQL backend which stores my puppy data in the database and provides an API endpoint for me to query my database. Having a managed backend means I don't need to have my own server up and running on my own machine, I don't need to handle database upgrades or security maintenance, and I don't need to write any API endpoints. As a frontend developer, this makes my life a lot easier. Getting Started with Slash GraphQL Let's first walk through creating a Slash GraphQL account, a new backend, and a schema. You can or log in to your existing Slash GraphQL account online. Once authenticated, you can click the "Launch new backend" button to view the setup screen shown below. create a new account Creating a new backend with Slash GraphQL Next, choose your backend's ("puppy-playdate" in my case), ("puppy-playdate" again for me), (AWS only, currently), and (choose one closest to you or your user base, ideally). When it comes to pricing, there’s a generous free tier that’s enough for this app. name subdomain provider zone Click the "Launch" button to confirm your settings, and in a few seconds you'll have a new backend up and running! Once the backend is created, the next step is to specify a schema. This outlines the data types that your graph database will contain. In our case, the schema looks like this: Here we have defined a type that has the following fields: Puppy , which is a unique ID generated by Slash GraphQL for each object stored in the database id , which is a string of text that is also searchable name , which is an integer age , which is also an integer and will represent the number of times a puppy has matched with someone matchedCount , which is a string that contains the image url to be shown in the app profilePic , which is a string that contains a short description about the puppy bio , which is an array of strings representing the puppy's interests and is also searchable interests Adding Puppies Now that we have a backend endpoint and schema set up, it's time to add some puppies! The API Explorer in the Slash GraphQL web console allows us to easily execute GraphQL queries and mutations against our database without having to write or run any additional code within our app. We'll insert data into the database using this mutation: We can then query our database to fetch the puppy data as a quick sanity check that our seed data was inserted properly. The query looks like this: The data is then shown in the API Explorer's results panel like so: Querying our database for all our puppies Fetching Puppies (ha...) Now that we have our database populated with seed data, we can work on getting our puppies to show up in our app. I used to build the UI and for my component library to help speed up the development process. React Material-UI Rather than executing GraphQL queries and mutations directly, I chose to use to declaratively handle interacting with my backend API and database. Apollo Client for React Apollo Client utilizes . To get started, you first initialize a new client and then wrap your root component with a provider component. This makes the database data available anywhere in the app through the context. React's Context API Then in our file we can define a GraphQL query to fetch all the puppies: App.js We then declaratively execute the query inside our component and work with the response data by using Apollo Client's hook: App useQuery The result of calling that method is an object which contains properties for the response , state, info, and a method to the data. We only need access to the property and the method, so we destructure those two items from the object and then pass them down into child components as needed. data loading error refetch data refetch Welcome screen in the puppy playdate app Loading screen in the puppy playdate app as the puppy data is being fetched Updating Puppy (Love) Once the puppy data is fetched, the puppies are shown one by one as interactive cards. The "Tinder swipe" effect is implemented using an npm package called . react-tinder-card When a puppy card is swiped to the right (or when the heart button is clicked), an API request is made to the backend to increment the puppy's value by one. matchedCount This is done through Apollo Client again, but this time using the hook since this is a GraphQL mutation. useMutation Just as before, we first write our GraphQL mutation: Then we execute the mutation inside our component, this time as part of our swipe event handler method called : swiped Doug is a good boy Each liked dog is recorded. Once you've swiped through all eleven dogs in our database, your match results are shown! You matched with Louie! Next Steps That's it for our demo app! If you as the reader wanted to continue to build on this project, you could extend the app by creating an workflow and allowing users to create accounts and post their own profiles. You could also allow users to actually match each other and send them notifications when that happens. authentication Wrapping Up As I built this app and considered the features and functionalities I wanted to include, the database schema changed over time. I started without including the puppies' ages or their interests. When I decided that I did want to show that info on the puppy cards, I simply edited my schema in the Slash GraphQL web console to include the and fields. age interests I also originally started with a Boolean field to show whether or not you were matched with each puppy. However, since this app includes no authentication and can be used by any user, it felt more appropriate to instead use a field that recorded how many times each puppy had previously been "liked" by any user. matched matchedCount Making this tweak to the schema was again as simple as replacing the Boolean type with the Int type. matched matchedCount The flexibility of GraphQL in allowing me to edit my schema on the fly without having to rewrite several API endpoints greatly sped up the development process. And Slash GraphQL's API Explorer allowed me to easily execute queries and mutations directly against my database to experiment with the syntax and the fields I'd need before having to write any app code. The architecture I chose was perfect for developing this app – it made rapid prototyping easy! The are endless! paw-sibilities This article mentions a Slash GraphQL free tier. Dgraph recently updated their pricing model for Slash GraphQL. It’s now $9.99/month for 5GB of data transfer. No hidden costs. No costs for data storage. No cost per query. You can find . Update - January 20, 2021: more info here

Build Your Own Puppy Playdate Tinder App with Slash GraphQL

Apple's M1 chips have been quite revolutionary. These silicon chips were intended to create a new experience by enhancing the overall performance and improving battery life for their users. Apple released three new Mac devices on November 10 and two more on April 20, sliding towards the transition gradually. While M1 resembles A14 Bionic, Apple's favorite chip, to a great extent; its performance is far better than A14. With a stellar performance and breakthrough reviews, Apple is getting quite a knack of the hardware, which is getting Intel insecure. Let us understand how fast these chips are and how the two-year transition will affect the world. How M1 dominates the market Intel has been dominating the PC architecture for decades now. The competitions in the market are corrigible to an extent, making Intel always stay on top. This wasn't going down well with Apple because Intel's slow development had put Apple under performance pressure affecting its revenue on a bigger scale. Apple Ecosystem is divided into different subunits, and the PC world wasn't generating as much as the iPhone world. This was when Apple decided to take the plunge and have its chip in the market, assuring 100% transition by the next two years. And boy, did they make us proud! This is because M1 isn't just a processor chip. It is an amalgamation of an 8-core CPU, 8-core GPU, SSD controller, unified memory, Secure Enclave, and image signal processor all in one chip. This helped Apple reduce memory duplication, thereby improving the scope for batteries and unified memory experience, increasing the overall capacity. But this is just the first iteration, and the best is yet to come! Despite the chip being so new, it has managed to crush older Intel-based Macs and get the world talking about the future advancements already! Here are some numbers to back it up. M1 in numbers: According to the Market intelligence , M1 Macs currently holds 0.8% of the market share. The number is likely to hit 7% by the next launch. TrendForce Apple's grew tremendously after the November event last year, with a growth of 31.3 percent. international shipments The Cupertino-based giant managed to sell a whopping 6.9 million Macs from the 5.25 million simultaneously in 2019. These numbers indeed prove that M1 sure can expect a better future than we might presume, with the growth percentage hitting the new highs with the new iPad and iMac release. When the world started talking highly of the transition, Intel did not take it too well. And thus began the cold war between the giants. Intel vs. Apple Have we not admired Justin Long as the Mac guy in those infamous ? Well, guess what? Intel's brilliant response to the increasing M1 threat was to have the Mac guy hired an Intel guy and come up with many ads that don't make sense. Call it childish, eh? Intel vs. Mac ads As if the campaign starring Justin wasn't enough, Intel took the cold war a notch higher by launching a comparing M1 chips to their processors. I'll have to admit these were a trigger to some humorous memes last month. website Intel's kiddish response could have been due to the possible threat and a loss of market that Intel fears. Could they smell M1 success, or was it just a poorly executed marketing campaign? We will never know. What we shall know, though, is the real-time comparison between both the devices: Comparison: M1 Mac vs.Intel Mac Performance The Intel-powered MacBooks comes with a four-core i7 processor and Intel Iris Plus graphics. Whereas M1 has the upper hand here with an eight-core GPU and a 16-core Neural Engine. This leaves the M1 chip MacBook with a 2.8% faster performance than the Intel models, practically crushing them with their beast mode. Battery Life: The M1 MacBooks were advertised as having twice the battery life compared to Intel models. Apple may have exaggerated this a little bit, but it offers over 18 hours of battery life in the current models, which is almost double that Intel models. I forgot my charger at work while working from home over the weekend, and the baby did not blink at all. M1 got the world talking! (find this tomorrow) Here is what the who's who of the town think about the device Kudos, Apple. You've rocked the desktop world and used the Mac to change everything. Again. Again. -- Rene Ritchie, Youtuber In real-world test after test, the M1 Macs are not merely inching past top-of-the-line Intel Macs; they are destroying them. In disbelief, people have started asking how on earth this is possible. -- Erik Engheim, Developer My 13 inch M1 MacBook edits 8K footage just as well as my $80k Mac Pro. -- iJustine, YouTuber Keeping it simple with M1 M1 has proven to be in the game for the long run. The battery blows my mind away. The iOS experience on the MacBook is smooth, and the app's integration also is now getting quite convenient. The first generation proved to surpass everyone's expectations for sure. Future developments are surely going to be revolutionary for the PC world. I consider ourselves lucky to be witnessing something so powerful yet so simple at the same time!

Apple M1 Chip Review: How Apple's First Processor Is Taking The Laptop Industry By Storm

Over the last several years, the adoption of Kubernetes has increased tremendously. In fact, according to a , 78% of respondents in late 2019 were using Kubernetes in production. Leveraging Kubernetes allows organizations to create a management layer to commodify clouds themselves and build cross- or hybrid-cloud deployments that hide the provider-specific implementation details from the rest of the team. Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey One crucial part of the Kubernetes ecosphere is —a tool initially introduced by in 2016 to utilize the Kubernetes APIs themselves to deploy and manage the state of applications. Operators CoreOS Operators are a critical part of the deployment and operation of applications in a cross/hybrid environment. They can help manage and maintain state across a (multiple Kubernetes clusters running together) or even . federated Kubernetes deployment across clusters But what exactly are Operators, and how do they help manage these stateful applications? Let’s take a look at Operators in detail, how they work within Kubernetes, and how the KubeMQ messaging platform uses Operators to help you build complex and scalable messaging services with minimal coding and overhead. What are Operators? At a high level, Operators allow you to automate tasks beyond what Kubernetes natively provides. Operators are software extensions that hook into Kubernetes APIs and the control plane to manage a (CR)—or an extension to the Kubernetes API. The CR describes the desired state of the application, and the control plane component (the Operator itself) monitors the CR to ensure that the application is running as expected. custom resource For example, an Operator might deploy and scale a pod, take and restore a backup, manage network services and ingresses, or manage a persistent data store. Since Operators hook into native Kubernetes tools like , they become a common language for managing complex deployments where state is involved. Using a Helm chart is excellent for deploying and managing a stateless application like a web server. Still, for deploying stateful systems like etcd, PostgreSQL, and KubeMQ, Operators are the key to success. kubectl KubeMQ - Kubernetes-Native Messaging Platform Before we dive into understanding why Operators are an essential ingredient to KubeMQ’s success, let’s first examine the benefits of KubeMQ. At a high level, KubeMQ isn’t just a message broker or queue but a messaging platform that can be used to build a message-based architecture that works across multi- or hybrid-clouds and edge computing. KubeMQ allows services in these environments to communicate with each other in any messaging pattern—pub/sub, streams, queues, and so on. KubeMQ is and is easy and quick to deploy in less than a minute. Kubernetes Native Core components The KubeMQ messaging platform comprises four core components — , , , and . server bridges sources targets KubeMQ server is deployed to each Kubernetes cluster, which handles the message processing. KubeMQ help to build the desired messaging topology across clusters, sending messages between KubeMQ servers. bridges KubeMQ ingest messages from existing systems like RabbitMQ or Kafka into the KubeMQ platform. sources KubeMQ send messages to external systems, like Redis, PostgreSQL, S3, or other messaging systems like ActiveMQ. targets Combining all of these components allows for creating a cross-cluster messaging and no-code-message-based-microservices architecture on Kubernetes. How Does KubeMQ Use Operators to Succeed? So how does KubeMQ work in the world of Operators? First, KubeMQ deploys as an Operator to ensure that it can operate at a native Kubernetes level. One of the tenets of utilizing KubeMQ is that it is better to create many small clusters and bind them together rather than creating one massive cluster. This allows for better performance, scalability, and resilience. One key to success with this approach is utilizing Operators as the deployment and management tool for KubeMQ. The Operator deploys the clusters and ensures that the various KubeMQ bridges, sources, and targets are configured correctly for each cluster. This extends to how KubeMQ was written utilizing Go. This makes KubeMQ fast and helps hook KubeMQ into native Kubernetes data models, events, and APIs, making it less complicated to manage the state of the clusters. It also allows for easier configuration validation. Deploying as an operator also helps KubeMQ keep overhead to a minimum. For example, a large financial company with high volumes of real-time messages for price quotes, transactions, and client funding leverages KubeMQ to decrease the number of servers previously required to fulfill their needs. It has also allowed the company to reallocate the operational overhead to better tasks, rather than monitoring and maintaining messaging infrastructure. Similarly, the company has leveraged the KubeMQ operator to help elastically scale their infrastructure based on the load. For example, when markets close, demand drops, and the clusters can scale down accordingly. Cross/Hybrid Cloud and Operators The KubeMQ Operator also helps track state—a key reason for leveraging KubeMQ for reliable cross/hybrid cloud deployments. First, this state can validate that the desired capacity and configuration are in place for each cluster. Comparing the desired state in the CR against the existing state in Kubernetes allows the Operator to ensure that failures are caught and addressed, capacity is added as required, and the various bridges, sources, and targets are configured. One KubeMQ customer in the agricultural vertical heavily leverages this feature of KubeMQ to run their messaging platform across edge computing systems along with cloud deployments. This provides better performance and reliability and allows them to grow their business with new services without interruptions or downtime. They simply create new clusters and configure them as required. Knowing that the KubeMQ operator validates the CR definition helps to prevent deploying clusters with faulty configurations. Conclusion Operators are critical for managing and deploying complex Kubernetes systems. They operate utilizing Kubernetes-native APIs and systems. An Operator’s CR definition provides configuration management and validation at deployment time. They track the desired state against the existing state and act accordingly if there are any deltas between them. Operators are well-known and understood at most organizations, ensuring that no additional training is required for operational success, KubeMQ heavily leverages the Operator model to help customers succeed in building out complex and scalable messaging platforms with minimal coding and overhead. This helps to deliver greater business value by allowing organizations to solve business problems quickly and efficiently without spending time and resources on managing and maintaining messaging infrastructure. Also published at https://mlaccetti.medium.com/how-kubemq-customers-build-scalable-messaging-platforms-with-kubernetes-operators-e52353594df3

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