Container Practicality
and Serverless Cloud Native
Web vitals are the latest and greatest feature of developer tooling since page speed insights. Measuring the elasticity of cloud based virtual machines, code optimization, and database evoked configurations.
Largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift are the metrics that focus the developer of the 3rd decade of the twenty first century.
What these words mean, as these metrics mean, each user experiences to the depth of their awareness. Satisfaction on loading speed and quality, timing of actuation in page opening, and ease of access when approaching web/software as a solution.
Architecture Vitals
Web and applications are leading together in this turn of digital prosperity as API(Application Programming Interface) create many of the rhythms that find products to their users.
Preparing solutions for production has been a continuous effort of developers and engineers alike since the beginning of the internet. Transparency around connectivity becoming increasingly visible to users at a metric cadence outside of those walls.
Containerized Computing with Platforms as a Service
Whether you have worked in enterprise technology, software development, or web infrastructure — core elements of development are shifting to the end user and in turn the web development.
Servers that used to be shared and segmented partitions are now becoming virtual. Meaning programs that act as severs to service the needs of your software/website at a larger scale. Containerizing these instances has been an ongoing benefit to the ecosystem, helping systems engineers to migrate, update, and scale architecture to support systems across the globe.
Container Workflow
Through workplace, Meetup, friends, and colleagues I have developed an affinity for the prospects of VPS(Virtual Private Servers) and identifying how to use these technologies to further enable my development practices.
Containers align the idea of constructing particular environments, into fitted constructs that support the application/software/website spinning within that environment. The customization not only affords the developer to keep cost at actual usage, but improve the ability of that solution to support its users.
The focus on vitals was something particularly focused around JavaScript development, as many browsers now run these programs natively, utilizing even the same engine as the programs being written.
Expanding my intrigue of developing SSR(Server Side Rendered) applications into caching policies and headers, then into servers, and cloud computing I have been exploring container development for scaled instances.
Kubernetes Engine
Google Cloud Platform has become my go to for testing, development, and hosting in the past year as web vitals began to reach into the software engineering state of architecture.
If you are unfamiliar with this page, and you are a WordPress developer, you should jump in like I did to understanding the amazing benefits of self hosting your own installation of WordPress. I wrote an article on how to build and scale these installations for developers looking to get into the work themselves.
I have worked through all three of these layers at this point, most instantiations will only need a VM with App Engine services. I say most because there are some larger sites using WordPress where Kubernetes could save cost and comfort for those looking to scale.
Global Traffic
Web vitals play from our code, organization of files and systems, then the server itself. Loaded against, often, a mobile device of small means and compute power we have come to understand that overbuilding architecture is the way to go for solvability and security.
In Kubernetes Cluster Management I have recently established a self-managed 1–3 pod WordPress install with a global ip, Ingress service for load balancing, cloud DNS API for domain management, and CloudFlare CDN attachment for global caching of services.
What all of these solutions mean, is at the cost of your monthly VM(Virtual Machine) or VPS(Virtual Private Server) installation that costs $30–40/Month you can have a global server that is cached, secured, and reaches any user anywhere.
The relevancy of this cluster now extends to the countries around the world that were only seeing part of my site, to extensively reach into the world for customers that can find my solutions in search, while living in New Zealand to Africa.
Computational State of Global Web Services
Where all of these vitals and services meet, is that on the main axis of any horizon this is always a best practice and then there is an accepted practice. The accepted practice pushes into the higher reaches of achievement when it excels in its framework to redefine how in which these variants appear.
Working on technologies to provide DOM-Forward & render efficient patterns is an overarching goal within all of the defer/async standards, web image practices, and server side functions that enable web vitals.
From an experiment I ran through Next.js I was able to reach these core web vitals at their maxima. Iterating these practices into production sites took consulting from exceptional local engineers and a bit of research.
Vitals are a rabbit hole of optimization that often require rebuild/mass assimilation of code to support the restructuring. You can read more about this initial solution in a blog I wrote about the software stack.
What we learned from the actuality of methodology is that software patterns and the thought behind architecture still in fact are the biggest resulting factor in efficiency.
Developers are many, skilled programmers are few. Much as sports narrows down the winners with championships, does the result of efforts to a solution on its success. From the maze that is web architecture to the outcome that is software applications, we must strive to continuously be our best.
DOM-forward, imperative programming & state machines are my current topics of interest in the field of software engineering as they have driven the result of more efficient websites & applications.
As I continue to push WordPress into a new sphere through both code and architecture, I will look to these interaction considerate frameworks to apply how in which solves for better.
JavaScript is built on the logic that we access the internet with, therein the proceeding networks before are challenges to refit these methods, and orchestrating a new system of containers is the answer to make this solution much easier.
Kubernetes
Though Google Cloud is not the only way to get Kubernetes in sync with your web server, I have found that is quite the simplest as was Firebase for assembling simple architectures that scale quickly.
Kubectl(Kubernetes Command Line Interface) makes server files a breeze as it connects Google Cloud SDK with your editor to make your terminal a process engine for setting up these environments.
Alternatives to the simple CLI can be found in container programs such as Docker, that in fact enable an even further access to the spinning of web architectures for solution.
Connect
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