How to develop app with efficient and most economical development cost

Bai June Note: How to develop an app now, can be efficient and the most cost-effective development costs? How does a technical team build and need a backend engineer? After reading this article, perhaps you will open the brain hole, I believe really can through the Internet, through technology to change life.

Development mode determines efficiency

On the development approach, the last two years the most popular word is cloud computing. The iterative speed of technology refers to the increasing number of levels, and cloud computing is one of the tipping points of this digital iteration. The direction of software development must be getting simpler and less costly.

Cloud Services 1.0

If you are an app, please select at least one useful cloud service, especially for startups. The most famous example of this is Instagram, which was close to 50 million in April 2012 when Instagram was bought by Facebook 1 billion, while the entire team was only 13, and of those 5 technicians, only two and a half back-end engineers. The other half of the time is responsible for the front-end part of the development work, Instagram all services is deployed on the AWS. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, in his speech "How to be a 1 billion dollar company", attributed Amazon's cloud services to a surge in user size, but the engineering team did not show significant growth. Similar companies have Dropbox.

In this period of cloud Service 1.0, development is no easier than it used to be, but if you want others to use your service, simply deploy the program to the corresponding cloud host or app engine, saving a lot of operational costs. Like AWS (Amazon's cloud service), SAE (Sina's cloud service), Microsoft Azure and Aliyun, the server and operation costs that would have cost a lot of money were no longer needed, and instead a good cloud provider was chosen. Your server-side program can be fully deployed on the cloud server, initially due to the small amount of traffic, users do not have to pay fees. Pay on demand, when the amount of use really reached the charge, cloud service providers will receive a portion of the money. Of course, if we can achieve this pay standard, theoretically this project has been working well.

Cloud Services 2.0

Today more and more Baas (backend as a service backend) has sprung up in Silicon Valley, known as Cloud Services 2.0. I do not know if you remember that during the Chinese New Year has a particularly hot application, the App Store download list has been ranked top, this application is called "tease", to see the pace of the development of the racket. Tease the December 22, 2014 official online, on-line only 10 days, the user breakthrough 100,000, on line 42 days, into the APP Store total list first, on line 52 days, break through 10 million users, online less than three months, has now exceeded 16 million downloads. (The data is from the recruitment information released by the tease in the pull-hook network)

At present, there are many cases of successful use of BAAS services in China, many technology companies will encounter rapid growth of users, in this case, if the cost of the technology of the self-built services is how much? For example, if you are going to do a red envelope application, or your electric dealer site to hold a double 11 seconds kill activities, the technical team to maintain their own needs a considerable amount of resources input. But now many technology teams can easily handle these with Baas services without having to invest in a backend engineer. The cost of paying is much lower than the resources invested by the Self-built team, and more crucially, they save too much time and opportunity costs and spend more time on products and operations.

No-end development

Let's imagine that every time we want to do an app, there are always a lot of repetitive modules to develop. such as data storage, file storage, account system, SMS verification, statistical requirements and real-time communication modules, these modular engineers also strive to achieve universal, in order to develop later when more easily reused. Why do these modules have to be repeatedly written, not to make a common service it? The user wants to use which module uses which module, does not need the server operation dimension, also does not have to repeat the development, only needs to pay on demand, this is baas to achieve the goal.

But many people will have questions, so what if there is a server logic? General Baas service providers also provide a variety of server-side hooks (a program interface), for example, you want to save data before the server to verify the correctness of the data, Baas provider in the service side reserved a beforesave and other methods, Then you can write your own logic inside the function. Instead of worrying about the server architecture and performance, these things are done by the cloud service provider and you just need to write the corresponding logic.

Conclusion：

The development of human technology is through one innovation, Silicon Valley is in the forefront of innovation, in part because they are constantly reducing the cost of innovation, while making the team more efficient. Once the advent of an Internet product may require a lot of costs, human costs, promotional costs, research and development costs, of course, there are plenty of time costs. But now because of the advent of Baas and other services, at least the cost of research and development has been decreasing, so that the cost of innovation has been reduced, so that more resources for more important things. Of course Baas will not be the end, more and more service innovation will continue.

"Wang Yu, Leancloud front-end senior engineer, focus on app research and development thinking and innovation"

Source: Bai Net