In this Blog, we will explore why organizations should move to the cloud, what challenges they face and how well-architected CDK from CRE8IVELOGIX can make AWS effortless. Imagine you are part of an organization running its workloads in a traditional data center or on-prem environment. One day you meet a colleague who is a cloud enthusiast and speaks highly about the advantages of building and running cloud-native applications. He also talks about the long-term cost savings associated with running applications in the cloud. Even though the conversation sounded convincing, you think to yourself, why would someone spend the time, effort, and risk of migrating a perfectly running application in an on-prem environment?

Benefits of migrating to the cloud:

Your friend gives you a run down about the cloud benefits and how they all tie down to a single benefit that is cost-saving of up to 80%.
When your applications are running in the cloud, there is

• No upfront cost: You can sign up and start using available services without paying a dime.
• No over-provisioning: You can start with what you need and configure autoscaling to handle the increase in demand.
• No hardware maintenance: Cloud provider handles all the hardware maintenance for you.
• On-demand availability: Most of the services are available as needed.
• Elasticity and Reliability: You can scale to hundreds, even thousands of servers, within minutes.
• Global expansion: If the users of your application are spread around the globe, you can achieve global expansion in minutes.

In reality, achieving all of the above is possible in an on-prem environment, but it would cost so much that very few have the budget and resources to do it. On the other hand, the cloud provides all these features out of the box on a pay-as-you-go model.

Eventually, your friend convinced you that getting all these benefits without spending a fortune makes the cloud an attractive option. Whether you are a startup building a green field application or an enterprise migrating an existing application, you can save as much as 80% of the cost of running in an on-prem environment. Running applications in the cloud saves cost and empowers your team to experiment at will, increasing their agility in delivering business differentiating features.

Problems which organizations face when migrating to the cloud:

Cloud development seems relatively straightforward, where cloud providers provide the building blocks in the form of storage, compute, database, and other services, whereas customers build business applications by combining them in meaningful ways.

Although this looks easy on the surface, if you look deep, each of these services needs to be appropriately configured to conform to the well-architected pillars such as security, reliability, performance, operational excellence, and cost-effectiveness. This requires the teams to have in-depth knowledge about configuring these services, shifting their focus from building application features.
If your application uses microservice architecture, a better approach is to have smaller teams that focus on their piece of the microservice domain. As a downside, each team could reinvent the wheel and configure cloud services differently, resulting in inconsistent usage across the organization.

After familiarizing yourself with the challenges, you quickly realize the need for a common framework to address these design inconsistencies across different teams. This framework should provide security, operational excellence, reliability, and cost-effective use of services out of the box. In addition, this framework should make it easy to provision well-architected infrastructures for the most common patterns like building Rest APIs and websites.

How well-architected CDK from CRE8IVELOGIX can eliminate inconsistencies and make cloud migration easy:

By utilizing such a framework, teams across the organization should be able to accelerate their application development in a consistent way. However, building such a framework requires experience and in-depth knowledge of cloud services and would require months to develop. Because of the rapidly changing cloud landscape, a dedicated team is essential to keep this framework up to date.

To help startups and enterprises alike, CRE8IVELOGIX Inc. provides a framework called Well Architected CDK. This framework is built by highly experienced architects and developers who enhanced the CDK provided by AWS by adding security, monitoring, scalability, and compliance layers.

Why CRE8IVELOGIX Well-Architected CDK is the best option for cloud migration

Well-Architected CDK also provides patterns that allow developers to spin up commonly used infrastructures like Rest APIs in minutes based on best practices and AWS recommendations. Instead of spending weeks writing infrastructure code, developers only have to write 3-5 lines of code, whereas Well-Architected CDK generates 1000s of lines of code behind the scenes to provision an infrastructure that is well-architected.

It gets even better when a new feature or enhancement is introduced in the well-architected CDK; the users only have to update the version to get all the added enhancements. If you are starting a digital transformation project, CRE8IVELOGIX Inc can partner with you to help fast-track your project by architecting and building a cost-effective solution using well-architected CDK.

Perfectionism means a desire to produce something highly remarkable, exceptional, and unprecedented. It means holding such high standards for yourself that achieving them becomes impossible.

A lot of people confuse perfectionism with giving your best shot; these are two different things. Trying your best in the amount of time you have is good. But trying to achieve an unrealistic skill level or perfection sets you up for failure from the very start. It’s good to have confidence in your abilities and skillset. Still, when you set perfectionism as your goal, you always fall short of your expectations and keep disappointing yourself until you decide to quit your project.

How does perfectionism hold you back?

You feel you’re not good enough:

To succeed and improve yourself in any domain, you constantly need proof that you were born for it or that you are naturally talented to do it well. Since a perfectionist always thinks that his next painting will be a Mona Lisa painting or his next startup will be as innovative and famous as “Facebook, Linkedin, Uber,” he always falls short of his expectations. Although he might’ve written a good book or developed a good application, he doesn’t see any brilliance, magic, or excellence in his creative work. He compares it to the creation of people who’ve spent years honing their craft and gets disappointed. He feels he’s never going to be good enough. Frequently, he’d not even publish that work since he sees it with contempt and disdain. When he doesn’t publish his work, he never learns where he stands and lives in a distorted version of reality in which he’s not good enough.

It holds you back from taking risks:

You always take advantage of templates and themes when you want to build the perfect pitch deck or the most attractive website. The reason is that you fear that going for custom code may end up with something that is not per your expectations and high standards. Although this way, you might build something which appears attractive, it won’t be nearly as engaging as the one you’d have created if you had experimented a bit.

Experiments often result in time wastage. However, experiments and risks cause perspective shifts; We learn new ways of doing things and better ways of doing things. We learn about what works best in our case rather than for everyone. For instance, a person might read on the internet that meditation works best for calming one’s mind. But, he might never find meditation effective. He’d have to try several things like hanging out with friends, reading, and listening to music to learn what calms his mind. Maybe he can shift towards deep meditation practices after learning to focus more after engaging in these relatively easy activities.

On the other hand, if he were a perfectionist, he’d want to perform meditation or complex yoga exercises flawlessly as step one for focusing and will get infuriated when his mind would not stop negative thoughts and become as peaceful as 5am. He’d spend hours researching these exercises on the internet before even trying for the first time. He’d want to get every step right as per the instruction manual. But when he would fail to perform precisely like those yoga or meditation gurus, who have spent years practicing, he’d again feel like an imposter, a good for nothing.

Unexpected change of plans or requests put you to stress:

Suppose you’re a video editor. You’re editing a video. You have a deadline approaching, expecting all the video clips to be stable. But, just at the last hour, you learn some clips weren’t as stable or smooth as you’d want them to be.

At this point, the perfectionist would want to shout, scream, tear off his hair, bump his head against a wall, curse himself, remind himself of the times he has screwed things up before, type up a message to the client that he won’t be able to deliver on time and will need to re-do the whole video. Meanwhile, the client can’t offer any more extensions, and he’d most probably cancel the project when he reads his message.

If, on the other hand, this video editor was not a perfectionist, he’d realize that screw-ups are a part of life; He has learned an important lesson from this experience. He’d improve next time and pay special attention to stability when recording videos. He’d then work on a solution or a workaround, like using a warp stabilizer or slowing down the clip to make it more stable. What he won’t do is “Play the victim!”

So a perfectionist has an “All or nothing” mindset, where he believes in either delivering a project precisely in accordance with his vision or not delivering anything at all.

Perfectionism makes you live in constant stress and worry:

Even if a perfectionist musters up the courage to deliver a project, he’d still be looking for examples proving that his work could’ve been better.

He’d not be happy to see that he has progressed significantly from where he was before. Even when his clients are happy with his work, He will make up future catastrophe scenarios where his work is being mocked or ridiculed by others. When he sees someone doing something in a better way and then he gets infuriated at himself for not taking that route or course of action. He’d never be able to look at his work with pride. He’d rob himself of the satisfaction of giving something your best shot. He’d always find tiny mistakes in his grammar, punctuation, or methodology. He’d be his own worse critic, and his constant self-criticism will soon lead him to abandon his project, which he was once passionate about.

How to battle perfectionism

• Publish the work after giving your best shot. Stop listening to the voices inside your head that say, “let’s give it another go,” even after several attempts and proofreading or reviewing it repeatedly.
• Tell yourself that whatever the consequence may be, you’ll learn something from it, move forward, and gain momentum, and rejection doesn’t mean the end of the world. You’ll still get more and better opportunities even if your mind tells you that if this project goes south, the ground will open up and swallow you whole.
• Redefine your success metrics; For instance, a success metric could be “I have to make it better than the last time.” “I’d consider it a win even if one person gets inspired by this video.” “I’d consider it a win even if I read two pages today.” “I’d consider it a win even if I send a well-articulated and well-researched project bid today.”
• Stop comparing yourself to everyone who appears successful on social media. Your only competition should be with yourself.
• Take risks, and be open to failures. You should tell yourself that taking fewer risks might mean success in the present. Still, it won’t prepare you for dealing with diverse, challenging situations where a knowledge of different methodologies, techniques, or skill sets is required. When you take risks, you learn multiple ways of doing things, allowing you to choose the most optimal way of doing the assigned task or achieving a required outcome.
• Don’t beat yourself up. Realize you’re a work in progress. Tell yourself of all the things you’ve been able to do before remarkably well. Tell yourself you did a good job. Maybe take yourself out to buy icecream to celebrate your first attempt.

Ultimately, I’d like to sum it up by saying, “Fall in love with the process rather than the outcome.”

You’ll never improve the outcome without falling in love with the process.

In this blog post we will build on top of the knowledge acquired in the last two blog posts about Blockchain and cryptocurrencies. We will explore bitcoin mining, joint accounts and smart contracts.

Mining:

Remember The Gold Rush? When people were flocking to mine for gold? Today, Bitcoin can also be mined. How? Let’s find out.

Bitcoin mining is a process in which a complicated mathematical puzzle needs to be solved, and solving this puzzle requires a lot of computational power. Typically, this would take ordinary computers years to find the solution, and thus, it needs a lot of electricity. Whoever solves that puzzle first is rewarded with Bitcoins, and these new Bitcoins are minted and added to the total Bitcoins supply in circulation. Hence, the term “mining” was coined. But why would we waste electricity? To prevent double-spending.

Transactions created in the Bitcoin network are collected by miners who then try to solve the puzzle. Every 10 minutes or so someone can solve the puzzle and thus gets the right to put all his/her collected transactions in a Block, making it a part of the Blockchain.

Once the transaction becomes part of the Blockchain and a few more blocks are added, it becomes computationally costly to maliciously modify the Blockchain to double-spend the Bitcoin, which is already part of an existing transaction.

This mining algorithm is called “Proof of Work”, and it’s an exquisite way to keep the Blockchain system safe and consistent without the need for an intermediary.

Mining Farms:

Since mining requires a lot of computational power to solve the mathematical puzzle, some companies own one or more computer data centers. These data centers are called Mining Farms, and they have hundreds and thousands of special purpose computers explicitly built to solve these mathematical puzzles.

Today, multiple mining farms owned by different companies compete to solve the puzzle for claiming the Bitcoin reward.

As more miners join the network and more powerful computers are introduced, the mathematical puzzle gets harder and harder for miners to solve, so on average, it should take around ten minutes to solve, no matter how powerful the computers get.

Joint Accounts:

Joint accounts are prevalent in the real world. For example, we have joint accounts with our spouses, business partners, etc. In joint accounts, a designated number of participants are needed to authorize a transaction. Is it possible to enable joint accounts in the Bitcoin system? Are we out of luck? Is that a missing feature?

The good news is that the Bitcoin system is robust and supports joint account features, making it even more powerful and flexible.

To understand how the Bitcoin system provides this feature, we first have to understand the technology which makes it possible.

Multi-Signature:

In the world of Bitcoin, a special purpose program called P2SH (Pay to Script Hash) enables multiple signature support. Think of it as a virtual person sitting inside the computer to ensure the minimum required valid signatures are present before releasing any payment(s) or other funds. The P2SH program is also assigned a Bitcoin Address where anyone can send Bitcoins. However, multiple digital signatures are required to use the Bitcoins received at the address.

The number of digital signatures required to unlock Bitcoins is pre-programmed in the script. So, in essence, P2SH scripts act as a governing entity.

Contract:

If the P2SH script can govern access to Bitcoins via multi-signatures, is there any way we can administer arbitrary contracts on Blockchain? The answer is YES! However, the Bitcoin system is designed to transfer value, so it cannot carry out complex contract logic involving the transfer of assets.

This takes us to another world built on top of Blockchain infrastructure and utilizing the same concepts we have learned so far.

Ethereum and Smart Contracts:

Ethereum was built on Blockchain and introduced the concept of Smart Contracts. Smart Contracts are special-purpose programs run on an Ethereum network and provide the governing capability.

Smart Contracts are powerful enough to build complex logic like Deeds Enforcements, Assets Exchanges, Supply Chains Tracking, Property Contracts Executions, etc.

Like a computer application, these Smart Contracts must be programmed to implement special use cases.

Blockchain Overview:

Blockchain has proven to be an undeniably fascinating electronic ledger. It helps ensure that processes, procedures, interactions, governance, and currency are streamlined without an intermediary (middleman or agent). Despite the ingeniousness of this invention, it is still relatively unknown to the average person around the globe.

This blog post is for a general audience; therefore, it does not require prior knowledge.

Firstly, it is essential to understand the basic concepts upon which Blockchain is built as this will subsequently broaden our knowledge of how it functions.

After grasping and understanding the concepts mentioned in this blog, you will be able to understand these blogs about cryptocurrencies and smart contracts.

Hashing Function:

A hashing function is a mathematical function that takes in any random text and generates a fixed-length text. Think of it as a box in which one can put any size document(s), and it will produce a unique token with a fixed length.

Message: “My name is XYZ, and I would like to transfer $100 to my friend ABC.”

Output = Hash(Message)

Output: GEWWRR12REQW

It’s important to note that the Hash function’s output will be uttered entirely if the message is changed completely or slightly. Hash functions are irreversible; given the output, the original message will never be found.

Cryptography:

The word “cryptography” originates from Greek, meaning “Secret Writing”. Cryptography is a science of protecting data against tampering, eavesdropping, unauthorized access, and malicious use. Through cryptographic algorithms, once the information is locked (encrypted), it is nearly impossible to unlock (decrypt) that information without the knowledge of a secret key. However, using the most advanced computing power cannot guarantee such a decrypting process.

Cryptographic algorithms are reversible, unlike the Hash functions. So the message locked using the secret key can be unlocked to retrieve the original message.

Public Key Cryptography:

Public Key Cryptography is a technique in which two keys are used to encrypt relevant information or data. One of the keys, called “Public Key,” is used to lock vital information and is publicly available to users. This is similar to an individual’s bank account number, which can be shared with others if desired. The second key, the “Private or Secret Key,” is used to unlock vital information. This key is similar to the PIN of a debit card or the signature on a check. The public/private key pair is analogous to a lock. For example, anyone can put a lock on a box, but once locked, no one can unlock it unless the private key is available.

Public Key: XSDGD1SDF34AD

Private Key: GF34GREHS54AS

It is the user’s responsibility to keep their private key safe from anyone else. If the key is compromised, it can be used for malicious purposes by hackers or criminals. Just like if someone can retrieve the PIN of another individual, they will automatically possess the power to do away with the victim’s finances once such an opportunity presents itself.

Digital Signature:

We can create digital signatures using a combination of Hash Function and Public Key Cryptography. Consider using a document with text.

Message = “I would like to pay $10 to XYZ.”

We then hash it to get a unique token.

Hash = A1B2C3

Then, we sign this hash with our private key.

Signature = Sign (Hash, Privatekey)

This will give us a signature value that anyone can verify using the public key.

Verify (Message, Signature, PublicKey)

This will output “Verified” if the message is the same as what was signed. If it is not the same, then it will fail verification.

Centralized Systems:

Centralized computing systems are owned and controlled by organizations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Banks, Governments, and more. Users can interact with these systems over the internet; whatever data they provide is then stored in the central databases. These organizations have complete control of the data and can use them as they please. Furthermore, each organization enforces its rules for using its system.

Decentralized Systems:

Decentralized systems are formed by a computer network in which no central authority exists. Anyone can join and leave the network and access the information as they please. The users, not the organizations, control the data on the decentralized networks, which is more like a democratic system, where users are in control.

Blockchain:

A favorite question among people who have just begun familiarizing themselves with this new technology is: Why is it called “blockchain”? This stems from the concept that, within blockchain technology, blocks of information are connected using the hash value of the data inside the block. 

The Blockchain is exceptionally secure because even the most minor change in any block can alter the value of the original hash, ultimately breaking the chain. This means that any malicious attempt to corrupt data can be easily detected and will be rejected by other computers in the network.