Application Deployment Automation: Update With A Single Command

Deployment automation allows the software to be transferred from the test environment to the production environment – and vice versa – through automated processes: in this way, repeatable and reliable deployments are obtained for the entire application distribution cycle. This functionality is part of the typical DevOps concept of the CI / CD pipeline and refers precisely to the continuous deployment of artifacts.

This allows you to update the development, certification and production environments with a single command, favoring the speed and efficiency of the deployment. In a development model that does not follow the logic of DevOps, developers have to wait for feedback from the Operations department, with consequent slowdowns in the development process and delivery delays.

With The Nonstop Arrangement Notwithstanding, It Is Feasible To

1. Release new features faster and more frequently;
2. Test whether new features work as they should via unit or integration tests integrated into the deployment process. With the ability to set code coverage constraints and preventive deployment blocking;
3. Deploy the application in a natural environment and monitor its behavior when it interacts with other tools and dependencies, allowing the identification of even the most difficult bugs to intercept;
4. Work with automated tasks and reduce manual work, reducing error minimization rate and project cost.

DevOps Deployment Automation: Fewer Errors, Maximum Speed

The CD pipeline and deployment automation is divided into several phases:

1. compilation queues;
2. Unit tests;
3. Code analysis;
4. Installer creation.

If these steps are completed successfully, the executables are packaged into files stored in an artifact repository for later use. With automatic deployment, the quality of the test directly affects the quality of the releases: this is why its adoption primarily involves a change in the approach to software development.

The software distribution process is subject to several errors. Deployment is a process usually controlled by a shell script. There are often 15-20 different scripts created and managed manually by the developers. When an update is required, the time needed to ensure everything runs smoothly could be significant, albeit essential, to avoid incurring low performance or any blocks.

With A Continuous Distribution Instead 

1. automated implementations are faster than manual ones;
2. nothing is taken for granted;
3. percentage of risk on the safety side reduced to a minimum;
4. Lower costs due to more efficient work of developers;
5. Faster MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) thanks to automatic rollback.

Software Deployment Automation Tools

There are several tools on the market for the construction and management of pipelines and, therefore, deployment automation, including open-source. The most used among the available solutions is undoubtedly Jenkins which runs containers and plug-ins, such as Apache Tomcat. Over 1700 plug-ins enrich the software integration, automation and distribution processes and provide a customizable environment. Being a tool that has been around for several years, it is suitable for legacy technologies and supports cloud-native applications.

GitLab, available on-premise and in the cloud, works exclusively with its repository system. It offers continuous distribution, manual distribution verification and rollback, fine-grained RBAC, comprehensive audit trails, and proprietary secrets management. Automatic deployment is included in continuous integration solutions, representing the second step of the CI / CD pipeline. The continuous integration process is undoubtedly more mature than the deployment and delivery part, but the platforms typically include both. 

Container Deployment Automation

It is good that the company first containerised the applications to obtain better results from deployment automation and, generally, from DevOps pipelines. CI / CD pipelines work much better with containerized applications. A container takes only a few seconds to start up and responds to the innovation needs of automation via a channel. Containerized applications don’t use as many resources as virtual machines, are faster, don’t require installation, and are highly portable. 

SketchUp is one of the most used software for drawing and creating 3D objects: here is a step-by-step guide explaining how to create a coffee table. If you’re new to 3D design and printing, chances are you’ve already heard of SketchUp, one of the world’s most popular free or paid modeling and design tools.

SketchUp is 3D modeling and rendering software. The software has tons of large data-based models and objects ready for download if the user is not a great expert. If, on the other hand, you want to try your hand at creating 3D objects with SketchUp, you can also model from scratch or even import a file and work on it. Very useful for those who have to design objects or interior spaces, this program allows users to see their designs. 

This feature becomes very useful when you want to make changes or share a project with others for further revisions. SketchUp takes models created by the user or downloaded from the web and places them in 3D environments. It is used in many different areas, from building buildings, homes and offices to creating games, product design and architectural projects indoors and outdoors.

Users who use it can create and modify furniture, decorations, any object and furnishing material. Users can model the interior design project intended for a private or commercial space by managing different levels and styles of the 3D models. Here is a guide that explains how to create a simple living room table step by step.

ALSO READ: Modern Digital Philosophers: Who They Are And What They Do

Create An Interior Design Project With SketchUp

If you are not particularly familiar with 3D modeling software, it is advisable to start with an object that is easy to create, for example, a coffee table. You can use a small size to test before making the final version, which can also be printed. First, if you have not yet purchased SketchUp, use the free version that all users can use from the web.

To do this, go to the official SketchUp website and in the Products menu at the top left, choose Products > SketchUp Free. Click Start Modeling to display the software home page. To start the work screen, click on Create new or choose, using the down arrow on the right, the preferred decimal system, which will then be used for measurements within the application.

Creating A Coffee Table With SketchUp: Part 1

At this point, you will have arrived at the SketchUp work screen. On the side of the work area are menus, while at the bottom right is the box where you can enter any measurements you have. To start creating a coffee table:

1. Draw the legs first.
2. Choose the Rectangle tool from the menu on the left and draw a square.
3. Use the Push / Pull tool to create the first table leg. If you want to see the result better, use the Orbit tool.

During the use phase of the Push / Pull tool, the user can choose the length of the leg at the moment by going by eye or, for more precise work, indicate the measures to be respected in the white box at the bottom right. Pick up the Rectangle tool and create a second square. Then click on the Push / Pull function to make the second table leg.

To view and monitor the distances between the four legs more accurately, you can use the Measure with tape tool. In this way, there is no risk of mistaking the Measure and giving life to a crooked table. After creating two of them, click on the Select tool in the first place of the toolbar on the left and select both legs enclosing them in a single square to facilitate the drawing of the legs. Now click on the right mouse button and choose the Create group function.

How To Create A SketchUp Coffee Table: Part 2

Right-click again and copy the group. Before gluing, move the first group of legs using the Move function, marked by the four red arrows arranged in a cross. After moving the first group to the desired position, proceed to create the other two legs.

Choose the Select tool, go back to where the first group was, click the right mouse button and choose the Paste functionality. At this point, you will have the table’s four legs perfectly equal and well-positioned between them. To ensure their position is correct, you can use the Orbit tool again and look at the newly created objects from any angle.

Now select all new elements again with the Select tool. Be careful to insert all the legs of the future table. Right-click and create a new group. Now you can go to create the base of the table. Choose the Line function, i.e. the pencil icon, and type a continuous line, carefully touching only the outermost points of each leg.

Take the Rectangle tool and create a rectangle over the lines you drew. Use the Push / Pull tool to create the desired thickness for the board. To see if the result of the work is precisely what you expected, use the Orbit function and view the object from the desired angles.

Digital philosophy is a contemporary branch of philosophy that tackles traditional issues with a new approach: let’s discover its exponents.

Reality is constantly changing, and new phenomena influence people’s lives, the universe, relationships, and the social world and can determine crises to be faced or opportunities to be seized. Philosophy, a discipline that analyzes and asks questions about the world and the human being, can only change over time and consider the changes we are witnessing. 

New theories are elaborated, and strands of thought are born that aim to answer three big questions: what is life? What are consciousness, thinking and memory? And how does the universe work?

ALSO READ: Gain Visibility In The Media With A Press Office

Digital philosophy is a relatively recent branch of philosophy, which involves a study of reality through the integration of different disciplines such as physics, mathematics and metaphysics and the reinterpretation and reinterpretation of some philosophical principles developed in the past. It highlights an important moment for society: the invention of the computer, which, over time, has changed people’s approach to life and their mentality.

With digital philosophy, classical problems are faced from new points of view, new issues raised by contemporary reality are analyzed, and the activities of philosophers of the past are resumed, such as Kant, Descartes, Hobbes, Darwin, Hume and many other pillars of the history of philosophy. 

The contents of this new line are mainly related to the sector of innovation and technologies, in particular those of information. It is a world filled with ideas and theories developed by modern digital philosophers.

The Digital Philosophy: What It Is And When It Originated

The birth of digital philosophy cannot be traced back to an exact date and is not associated with a particular scholar. Its development is linked to a series of events and the contributions of different personalities from different disciplinary fields. Among these are found:

• The publication, in 1943, of ‘ A Logical Calculus of Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity’ by Warren Mc Culloch and Walter Pitts, neuropsychiatrist and mathematician, respectively;
• The birth of information theory in 1948;
• The debut of cybernetics in 1946;
• The publication of Wiener’s Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine ;
• Konrad Zuse ‘s ‘Calculating Space’, in which the theory that sees the universe as a vast computer is elaborated ;
• The first computational physics conference was held in 1981 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Convention Center, where the term ‘digital philosophy’ was used for the first time.

The 1981 conference was attended by authoritarian personalities, such as Richard Feynman, John Archibald Wheeler, Rolf Landauer and many others.

The press office aims to generate spontaneous media for the brand. For this, she is responsible for creating a good relationship with the most relevant communication channels in the sector. One of its main tools, for example, is the press release.

Have you ever stopped to think about what would be the motivation for a media outlet to announce the launch of a product or service without being sponsored? This is precisely the kind of return that a well-done job can bring. But anyway, how to get there?

That’s exactly what we’re going to show you here. Check out!

ALSO READ: Six Reasons Why Symfony Is Such A Productive Framework

Why Is The Press Office Essential For Any Company?

Regardless of the sector in which your company operates, it certainly needs to be concerned with two factors: conquering new customers and retaining current ones. This goes directly through building and strengthening the brand. As we mentioned in the introduction of this post, this is the speciality of the press office.

This area generates visibility for the company, its products and its services. In such a competitive market, this has become fundamental. After all, the new generation of consumers is much more demanding about their consumption habits.

The internet has made it much easier to compare products and services. Therefore, it is necessary to go further: more than offering quality at an affordable price; it is essential to keep your brand in people’s minds.

The good news is that the press office has the expertise of experts on the subject. When this team is efficient, you build your brand in the media, gain more and more spontaneous visibility, strengthen ties with the press, and, above all, with your customers.

At this point, it is natural to wonder what the tools and techniques are to achieve this goal. For starters, it is necessary to invest efforts to have a good press release.

How To Utilize The Press Release To Your Advantage?

The first step is to understand exactly what this communication tool is for. In a very objective way, the press release aims to disclose to the media in general something related to your company. This includes, for example:

• a product or service;
• company events;
• news in general;
• releases;
• local campaigns.

In general, everything that is relevant to journalists is conveyed through the press release. It’s easy to see why this tool is so valuable for communicating with the media. The point, then, is precisely to use it efficiently.

It is worth noting, for example, that journalists receive thousands of documents of this type daily. Consequently, the time to gain the attention of these professionals is short. If you want to ensure the effectiveness of the press release, it is worth adopting the following practices during writing:

• Create a cohesive title that brings as much information as possible in a few words and summarizes the idea in a single sentence (with a verb!);
• After the headline, immediately provide the location and date of the event to demonstrate that the press release is current and relevant (remembering that the location is where the company is located);
• Make an entry paragraph (lead) with a summary of 3 or 4 lines, focusing on what is most relevant;
• Answer the famous press release questions in the first paragraph of the text ( Who? What? Where? When? );
• Fill the body of the text with the bulk of the information ( Why? and How? ), using short paragraphs so as not to tire the reader;
• Conclude by summarizing the information, as many journalists skip right to the end;
• Remember to finish the press release with the About the company and the contact channels of your press office.

A good press release is the most concise and powerful tool for building your relationship with the press. Remember that it should open doors for your other marketing actions, generating opportunities for spontaneous dissemination in the media.

What Are The Main Tools Of The Press Office?

In addition to the press release, there are other strategies and tools that a press office must master. For example, you can have a clipping session on the company website. The function of this page is to gather the (best) mentions or spontaneous disclosures that the company received from the media.

It is worth noting that this content can be a good source of nourishment for newsletters, blog posts and other materials. This brings us to a second crucial point: the relationship with digital marketing.

If the press office helps to strengthen the brand in the media, marketing represents a powerful means of communication for the company. Roughly speaking, he creates and provides the messages that will give more color to this image created in people’s minds.

Added to this, it is worth remembering that the press office is responsible for dealing with crises, for example. In this case, it is essential to maintain alignment with digital marketing so that the company’s message is worked on at different levels of communication in a challenging time like this.

Finally, remember that the press office has great potential to reduce costs with marketing itself. Just think of big international brands: do Coca-Cola or Microsoft, for example, need to invest in getting new people to know their brand? It’s very unlikely.

In these cases, the press office practically dictates the pace of what is said about the brand in the media in general. Marketing investment, in turn, can be directed to create new campaigns, renew the company’s image, generate engagement with already loyal customers, etc.

A framework is a set of libraries that a certain technology makes available to us to solve common problems that usually appear in the development of web applications. That said, what’s wrong? Symfony making it productive as a framework? Here I show six sections that give us a general idea.

Symfony Is A Versatile Framework

There are various types of switchgear on the market. Those compact, very “monolithic” stacks are similar to CakePHP. Others are based on components like Zend, and there are also very light mvc frameworks for small applications like Fuel. Symfony can work like any of these.

We can configure it as a complete set: Twenty-one standalone components plus various external libraries such as Doctrine and self-developed and third-party bundles. But we can also use only some of its members or even the smallest and lightest version of this framework, Silex, which has only one file.

ALSO READ: What Is A Framework? And Its Types

Symfony Is Very Useful

Virtually all web applications have to solve common problems like user access, credential security if we have different types of roles in them, forms, data persistence, internationalization, etc. Sinfonia solves these repetitive problems simply, saving us time in development. It offers us a set of tools that allow us, as developers, to focus on the logic of our application and not on these problems that are already solved. We don’t have to reinvent anything that has already been invented.

Bundle: Essential Feature In Programming

Symfony has another very important feature which is bundles. These are exclusive features that we can reuse in other applications easily. This allows us to reuse our code for similar needs in applications with few changes. Not only does it allow us to create our features, but we can also use others made by third parties. A large catalog of bundles indicates their purpose, reliability and maintenance. Bundles are something like WordPress plugins.

Compile Good Practices Used In Other Frameworks

This innovative system has developed ideas about the best of other frameworks in the market and merged them into one. So he took cues from:

• tracks
• Django
• Spring
• Pitone
• Hibernation

It’s A Flexible Framework

It is very flexible in the application’s configuration and in the use of the templates. This means that we can work with different formats. Therefore, other developers will be able to develop the application in the most comfortable form. For example, to configure the application, we can do it via YAML, XML or PHP files.

We can do the same with templates. What? Using Twig as the engine to make them. It is easy, comfortable and powerful to use, but if we feel more comfortable developing them in PHP, there is no problem. This idea can also be extended to databases. We can use SQL storage like MySQL, SQLServer, Oracle and noSQL storage like MongoDB.

Support: A Key To Successful Performance

Fortunately, the system we are dealing with has many support tools. On the one hand, there is extensive documentation, from the official books we can get in pdf to the communities of this framework, where we will find forums with updated information in both English and Spanish. In the link section of interest, I show some of them. Therefore, we can summarize that it is a productive framework due to its flexibility.

It allows us to solve repetitive tasks very easily because it will enable us to create our features (bundles) that we can reuse in other applications or use third-party bundles because it brings together a picture of the best of many and because the support for our work is broad.