Archives: Glossary

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool. It enables Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), meaning that it can handle the state of infrastructure through idempotent changes, defined with an easily readable, domain-specific language instead of relying on Bash scripts.

If you want to handle several API calls easily at once, you’ll need to use an API gateway.

But an API gateway can mean several things: it might be an application that sits in front of your existing APIs, or it might be a managed service offered by a third party (by AWS for example).

API gateway solutions provide a number of advantages:

– They can act as a single entry point for all your API calls, which makes it easier to keep track of what’s going on.

– They can provide features such as rate limiting and authentication out of the box, which can help to improve security and performance.

– They can be used to create a unified API that accesses data from multiple backend services, which makes it easier for developers to work with.

An application container can help you to make sure your app behaves the same way every time you use it, because it contains all the necessary dependecies needed. It doesn’t matter where you deploy it (e.g. on a server, a laptop, or even a virtual machine) it functions exactly the same – as a standalone package for a software. It includes the application binaries and the software dependencies too, as a self-contained unit.

Asynchrony, in software programming, refers to events that occur outside of the primary program flow and methods for dealing with them. External events such as signals or activities prompted by a program that occur at the same time as program execution without causing the program to block and wait for results are examples of this category. Asynchronous input/output is an example of the latter case, and allows programs to issue commands to storage or network devices that can process these requests while the processor continues executing.

In an async function, you can await any Promise or catch its rejection cause. In ECMAScript 2017, the async and await keywords were introduced. These features make writing asynchronous code easier and more readable in the long run. They aid in the transition from asynchronicity to synchronism by making it appear more like classic synchronous code, so they’re well worth learning.

Callbacks are necessary because they allow you to queue up multiple I/O processes without having to wait for them to finish. Because these tasks run asynchronously, the app can get done more things at once (if the hardware can handle it). In Node.js, callbacks are used as a function called when a task is finished, and behaves similarly as a notification about the completion of the given task.

A cross-functional team has individuals with different roles like database engineers, testers, infrastructure engineers, etc. Cross-functional teams can ship code faster than functional teams because they can make their own decisions and work independently within an organization.

If you encounter a problem that you think someone else solved already, there’s a good chance that you can find a design pattern for it. Design patterns are “blueprints” prepared in a way to solve one (or more) problems in a way that’s easy to implement and reuse. It also helps your team to understand your code better if they are familiar with that specific design pattern – so before you try to solve a problem on your own, it’s worth trying to find a design pattern for it.

There are two ways to turn off a computer: by graceful shutdown, or hard shutdown. Graceful shutdown means that the OS (operating system) can safely shut down its processes and close all connections, however long that takes. This helps to prevent accidental data loss or other unexpected problems if the shutdown is performed intentionally by the user.

GraphQL is a server-side runtime that can execute queries using a type system. It’s a query language used for APIs, created from any existing code by defining types and fields.