I have a customer that has a test and production company in their Acumatica instance (hosted by Acumatica). I've made some customizations and need the customer to test but can't apply the changes to the test company without the code applying to the production company too.
So, I'm wondering what others are doing for having customers test changes before rolling them out to a production system?
As a partner/reseller, does Acumatica let us create test/playground instances in their cloud for situations like these, or do I need to set up this kind of environment on our own servers and let customers access a test/playground we set up for them?
Ask your Acumatica contact to setup a staging environment for you.
This is a usual request from partners and they'll know what to do.
Another good practice that reduces confusion when publishing customization is to pick a single company to publish all the customizations.
Related
Hello to all the community. Within the Metatrader platform, there is a way to create accounts once the desired broker has been selected. My problem arises when I want to automate this process from code. From my search on the internet I understand that the solution could be using the .crv / .dat files, from within the config folder where said platform is installed, which contain the necessary information. But unfortunately it hasn't worked for me because I don't even know how to read them.
Specifically, I would like to know if there is any API that allows me to carry out the explained process (account management), as well as consult information (account balance, trades ...) which is also shown on the platform. Currently I am only interested in demo type accounts.
The closest solution I've found is using this API, but it's not free and also doesn't work for all brokers.
There is basically no solution to register demo accounts for any broker this way as not all brokers support registering demo accounts via MT terminal.
If a broker allows creating demo accounts via MT terminal, then it is also possible to register a demo account via MetaApi MT account management api.
For most applications the revenue application owner will earn per demo MT account is much higher than a fee MetaApi charges for API use, thus the fee just makes sense. It allows the MetaApi team to continue working on the project while not reducing application owner earnings significantly.
However if your application is low margin then you might want to automate it yourself. In this case you will also need to spend either time or money or both to implement your own solution.
We developed a monolithic API to be used as a SAAS.
In the company we also develop custom build for some customers.
Some of our customers are asking for some features that are already implemented in the monolithic application.
We are thinking about splitting our API into microservices, but our major questions are the following :
Does microservices can be reuse across different projects ?
If we do split, do we create a microservice that everybody use or do we create an instance per custom build ?
E.G :
project A use "User", "Project" so we deploy 2 microservices
project B use "User", "Project", "Store" so we deploy 3 microservices
total number of microservices deployed : 5
If we create an instance of each microservice per custom build, won't be too hard to manage the communication between all the microservices within the same custom build ?
Or do we stick with one instance per microservice that everybody use and we specify the project source ?
As we are using C# GraphQL.
We also thought about creating Nuget package for each component, so each package will contains :
Exposed GraphQL Queries / Mutations
His own db
His own logic
E.G :
- Api A install "User" & "Project" packages
- 3 db are instantiated "Api.A", "Api.A.User", "Api.A.Project"
- Api B install "User", "Project" & "Store" packages
- 4 db are instantiated "Api.B", "Api.B.User", "Api.B.Project" & "Api.B.Store"
But does it make sense to do that ?
In my mind it could very similar from Hangfire https://www.hangfire.io/
Note that we are currently using AWS Serverless to host our applications.
An important point is that we are a small team 2-4.
We are very open minded so any suggestion is good to hear.
Thank you !
First of all, I would like to say is that there is no right way here and I am providing my point of view from the way we have already done things hoping it will guide you in finding a solution best suited for your requirements.
So to understand your dilemma, you have a base vanilla product which is an API SAAS and there is a customized deployment for some customers as well. But as you are having to build custom deployments for each customer you are noticing a common pattern, wherein a lot of the functionality is repeated across the SAAS for each customer.
Now assuming I have the requirement correct, I would say micro-services will provide definite benefits in your case in terms of scaling and customer-specific customization which will be managed by independent teams.
But a lot of this depends on how your business logic is structured and how big and vast your customization is. Some of these questions should drive your solution are.
Can you store Customer-specific data in a central data store or at customers' end ? & How are your databases going to be structured and how many of them?
How big are the customizations ? are they cosmetic or workflow adhering?
How much cross-communication you expect across various services like User, Store, and Project and if there is any communication across A.User - B.User or A.Project - B.Store, etc?
Now moving to some of the important things you might want to consider post answering the above questions.
Consideration 1. If the data stores can be allowed to be in a single central place you can go ahead with a single cluster where all your micro-services can be deployed. But looking at the data provided I can assume you have multiple databases per customer and I would recommend to keep them separate and not introduce any coupling between them. Thus you may end up with one microservice or microservice per customer which talks only to that customer's database. ( more in fig.1)
Consideration 2. The customization as far I the norm goes should be separated from the service itself and your every service should have an input for configuration loading which will drive the service behavior. Again depending on how big your customization is there can be a limit to this configuration and in those cases, I woul recommend creating a new service with customizations built-in.
Consideration 3. This is a major factor for deciding the number of microservices you may have, but the boundary of each service should be defined by the domain, for example, a User service, a Store service, and a Project service. These are the vanilla services that interact with each other to produce a valid business scenario. And each of the customers is just specialized instances of these services.
ok Now that this is done lets gloss over your primary questions...
Des microservices can be reused across different projects?
-- Yes you can, but again it depends on how you have designed the business workflow, configuration injection.
If we do split, do we create a microservice that everybody uses or do we create an instance per custom build?
-- Yes this would be an ideal scenario enabling separation of concerns across projects as we do not want to mix data boundaries and client-specific sensitive configurations. That said there might be a case where the single microservice solution is what is demanded but should be done with caution.
If we create an instance of each microservice per custom build, won't it be too hard to manage the communication between all the microservices within the same custom builds?
-- Communication across microservice is an important part or factor which is more often than not unavoidable in most cases. Thus considering you will be requiring some form of cross microservice communication you can look at an enterprise bus or API communication based on your requirement. But it is a known triviality is my opinion.
Or do we stick with one instance per microservice that everybody uses and we specify the project source?
-- I would not recommend this as the example stated in your question for a module for database injections doesn't sound a good idea to me. This will cause a highly coupled system design. And this might also mean if one service fails all your customer sites go down. you surely wouldn't want that !!!
Now as it is said a picture is worth a thousand words...
I'm an absolute newbie in Azure API Management and I have a doubt regarding how to manage Products and APIs.
Let's imagine this scenario:
I create 3 diferent Products: One for representing my Development environment (DEV), the second one for representing my Preproduction environment (PRE) and the last one to represent my Production environment (PRO).
I create several APIs which I want to publish in my DEV environment and later promotion to the others. So I need every API in every different Product to point a different backend service, as my backend services are different in every environment.
In example:
I have 3 different versions of my backend service: ServiceDEV, ServicePRE and ServicePRO. As I develop my API, I use as backend service the one named ServiceDEV, and so my API is assigned to the Product DEV. Later I want to keep this DEV version for my API but I also want to "deploy" that API in the Product PRE to make it act as a façade for ServicePRE, and the same would happen when promotioning it to PRO.
The problem with this approach is that I need to clone the APIs and change their settings to make them point to the correct backend endpoint every time I want to promotion one of them from one environment to another, thus losing all the versioning for that API, as the cloning operation just clones the current version of the API.
I don't know if policies would meet my needs in this subject.
I hope you get what I'm trying to mean...
How can I manage this situation?
Am I focusing this subject in a wrong way?
Any idea about how to overcome this?
Thank you!
If you follow this approach then you indeed could use policies to manage different backends for different products. You could create APIs without specifying backends ervice URL entirely and later use set-backend-service policy at product level to direct call to a proper endpoint.
One limiting factor of this approach is that whatever changes you may want to do to an API in dev environment (think change signature of an operation, or policy) will be immediately visible in other environments as well as this is a single API in all of them. If this is an issue, then consider having duplicate (triplicate) APIs - one per environment and later move their configuration via Azure API call.
When facebook rolls out a new version of their site, they show it to a percentage of users first.
How could I go about doing this cleanly?
Have your users sign up for your Beta.
Select a certain percentage of those who sign up for your Beta. As you make changes, keep incrementally adding some more testers. You don't want to let everyone in at once so you can get testing all the way up until the feature is complete and released. Look at stackoverflow as an example.
You would do this because most of the people who sign up will check out your beta version, then leave. They most likely will not come back / keep testing for you.
It is also better to opt-in than opt-out. Your users may not want to be your test subjects.
With a proxy that diverts some fraction of the sessions to one of two separate running instances. The proxy can be a software proxy on the hosting machine.
Well, depending on the change, if you have a farm of web servers you could apply the change to only some of the servers in the farm. That way only certain users who were "lucky" enough to hit one of the updated servers would see the change. Of course, this approach assumes that your web proxy will always route any given user to the same server (or group of updated servers) in the farm.
My current employer uses a 3rd party hosted CRM provider and we have a fairly sophisticated integration tier between the two systems. Amongst the capabilities of the CRM provider is for developers to author business logic in a Java like language and on events such as the user clicking a button or submitting a new account into the system, have validation and/or business logic fire off.
One of the capabilities that we make use of is for that business code running on the hosted provider to invoke web services that we host. The canonical example is a sales rep entering in a new sales lead and hitting a button to ping our systems to see if we can identify that new lead based on email address, company/first/last name, etc, and if so, return back an internal GUID that represents that individual. This all works for us fine, but we've run into a wall again and again in trying to setup a sane dev environment to work against.
So while our use case is a bit nuanced, this can generally apply to any development house that builds APIs for 3rd party consumption: what are some best practices when designing a development pipeline and environment when you're building APIs to be consumed by the outside world?
At our office, all our devs are behind a firewall, so code in progress can't be hit by the outside world, in our case the CRM provider. We could poke holes in the firewall but that's less than ideal from a security surface area standpoint. Especially if the # of devs who need to be in a DMZ like area is high. We currently are trying a single dev machine in the DMZ and then remoting into it as needed to do dev work, but that's created a resource scarcity issue if multiple devs need the box, let alone they're making potentially conflicting changes (e.g. different branches).
We've considered just mocking/faking incoming requests by building fake clients for these services, but that's a pretty major overhead in building out feature sets (though it does by nature reinforce a testability of our APIs). This also doesn't obviate the fact that sometimes we really do need to diagnose/debug issues coming from the real client itself, not some faked request payload.
What have others done in these types of scenarios? In this day and age of mashups, there have to be a lot of folks out there w/ experiences of developing APIs--what's worked (and not worked so) well for the folks out there?
In the occasions when this has been relevant to me (which, truth be told, is not often) we have tended to do a combination of hosting a dev copy of the solution in-house and mocking what we can't host.
I personally think that the more you can host on individual dev boxes the better-- if your dev's PCs are powerful enough to have the entire thing running plus whatever else they need to develop then they should be doing this. It allows them to have tonnes of flexability to develop without worrying about other people.
For dev, it would make sense to use mock objects and write good unit tests that define the task at hand. It would help to ensure that the developers understand the business requirements. The mock libraries are very sophisticated and help solve this problem.
Then perhaps a continuous build process that moves the code to the dev box in the DMZ. A robust QA process would make sense plus general UAT testing.
Also, for general debugging, you again need to have access the machine in the DMZ where you remote in.
This is probably an "ideal" situation, but you did ask for best practices :).