During the development of a web application, it’s useful to know what kind of load it can hold. Today the application’s speed is one of the most important indicators and it is worth taking it seriously. A slow running application can push your users away.

To check how much your application is ready for production, you can use some utilities to test your server performance. Slow request processing speed can also help to identify incorrect server settings or scripts.

We'll cover 2 tools for understanding server-side performance: Apache Benchmark (ab) and Siege.

Today Docker became an important part of the development process. Docker creates an isolated environment in containers within the operating system. This allows to get a transferable environment - everything in the container can be saved, copied and deployed to another system.

We'll prepare our own local docker environment for PHP development with components:

PHP 7.3
Nginx
MySQL 8
Redis

Last week I have successfully passed the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate 2018 and want to tell about my experience passing AWS certification exam. Amazon recommend have at least one year of hands-on experience in this field on AWS, but it's optional. Before I started preparing for the exam, I had experience with S3 and a little bit with Lambda, API Gateway, and DynamoDB. All other experience I got during preparation.

Apache Kafka is a fast, real-time, distributed, fault-tolerant message broker.

Using Kafka, you can transfer streaming data to the cluster, which is generated continuously, for example, a history of website visits, financial transactions, online shopping orders, application logs, etc. This information can help to understand what is happening with the data right now, create recommendations, use machine learning or aggregate data for further analysis. All this takes seconds or minutes, instead of hours and days.