How do you ensure your server-side code is reliable?

Using a Framework in software development offers severals benefits, including: 1. Efficiency frameworks provide a foundation of pre-built, reuseable code and components 2. Consistency frameworks often enforce coding standards and best practice. 3. Security Many frameworks come with builtin security features 4. Scalability frameworks are designed to handle growth. 5. Community and support This means you can get help and find solutions to problems 6. Code Reusability 7. Rapid development 8. Updates and maintenance 9. Testing and debugging Frameworks often include testing and debugging tools In summary, frameworks provide a structured and efficient way to develop software applications.

Frameworks are useful for reducing boilerplate and saving developers from writing the same “infrastructure” code over and over. They help devs get up and running quickly. Frameworks do not automatically help you write reliable code though. Reliable code comes from smart high-level architectural decisions (try Clean Architecture), very thorough and thoughtful error handling, and code to self-heal whenever an error is recoverable. If an error isn’t recoverable, then the problem should be logged, easy to spot for an on-call engineer, and intentionally surfaced to the client so the client can figure out what to do with it.

Framework can help with either of following features like - Structured development, - Scalability - Community & Ecosystem support - Code consistency - Abstraction & Automation easier this can help us to see glance view of our code or APIs.

Framework is the best way not only to organise your code but also the foundation of what problem you solve and how as a leader in the team you want the benchmark to be followed. The benefits of the framework are, - A well architected framework is very useful for stability and reusability of your server side code - A framework set a, boundary for your team mates to follow - In an agile development a well architected framework enables you to add more features incrementally without hurting the stability of the application. - Unit testability and increasing code coverage is achievable in a well designed framework

By adopting an MVC architecture, you can organize your code in a way that adheres to the MVC principles. Models handle data and business logic, Views take care of presentation, and Controllers manage user input and data flow between Models and Views. Not only does this promote code reusability and maintainability, but it also encourages writing modular code. And guess what? Consistent naming conventions specific to your MVC framework make it easier for developers to understand and work with your code!

It’s not enough to just write tests; they must be run regularly too! The best way to detect regressions and other defects before they reach production is to have your tests run automatically before deployment (and ideally before you even merge into your mainline). Note the magic word here: “automatically”. If you rely on humans running tests manually, they will sometimes forget, or will sometimes just ship code because another engineer said “lgtm”. People are fallible and forgetful. Play to the computer’s strength and let the computer handle the repetitive, mundane task of running your tests before shipping.

1. Test case execution should be the part of CI/CD pipeline. It prevents breaking a stable feature based on the new code. 2. Most of the time we only focus on the code coverage. Branch coverage should have more priority because it ensures the most corner cases.

1. When it comes to test it should be quality over quantity. High test coverage by itself does not guaranty a high quality product. 2. Tests should not be "brittle" i.e. false negative/positive are unacceptable. 3. Tests must run as part of the build process

writing test is not only the way to test server side code stability but keeping an eye on following factors is also important. 1) Code Quality 2) Security 3) Performance 4) Scalability 5) Logging and Monitoring 6) Error Handling 7) Documentation 8) Dependency Management in short, writing tests and using testing tools are essential components of ensuring code stability, they should be part of a broader strategy that includes code quality, security, performance, scalability, error handling, documentation, and ongoing monitoring and maintenance. A comprehensive approach to code stability is necessary to deliver a reliable and robust server-side application.

The key lies in writing comprehensive unit tests for our models, views, and controllers. By thoroughly testing each component, we can ensure that they behave as intended and catch any potential issues early on. Integration testing is also crucial to verify the seamless interaction between different components of our MVC application. Additionally, implementing robust validation and error handling mechanisms will help us handle unexpected scenarios gracefully.

It's also true that HOW you use version control matters quite a bit as well. Having a branching strategy that allows developers and teams to get code integrated, tested, and deployed with as little friction as possible is key. Also, have a plan for how to deal with merge conflicts. They aren't always avoidable, but they also don't have to be catastrophic events either. Overall, In my experience trying to reduce the number of branches (particularly long lived ones) while still allowing for enough segregation of work is the fine line to walk for optimal version control usage.

No doubt, version control is important but it's just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring server-side code reliability. Code Review, Security, Performance and Scalability, Documentation and Comments, Monitoring and Maintenance plays also vital role to make sure your server code is stable.

One could argue that software development at this age and time could not be accomplished without the proper use of version control systems (VCS) - the most commonly used of them is Git. The use of git makes collaboration possible. We can all agree that no great software is developed strictly by an individual. It requires inputs and efforts from other-like minds. History and accountability on the codebase are handled out of the box. This ranges from tracking the commit history and messages giving hints on why certain decisions were made at certain times while writing the code. Other usages of VCS include documentation purposes, code auditing, and even experimentation.

Using version control systems like Git. By leveraging Git, we can effectively manage code changes, enabling easy rollbacks and seamless collaboration among team members. It's a game-changer for maintaining the stability of our server-side code.

VCS shouldn't be questioned anymore. Distributed VCS' like Git or less distributed solutions like GitHub make it easy to share code, history and even documentation. A VCS even helps to reason about _which_ revision would be deployed (it doesn't always have to be the most recent revision).

Best practices for handling errors, you can enhance the reliability of your server-side code and provide a more robust and stable experience for users and clients such as: 1) Error Logging 2) Graceful Error Handling 3) Return Appropriate HTTP Status Codes 4) Custom Error Handling Middleware 5) Validation and Input Sanitization 6) Fail Safely 7) Automatic Error Notifications 8) Testing and Test Automation 9) Security Considerations 10) Documentation 11) Regular Code Review 12) Continuous Improvement

Find a good pattern/framework to help you manage errors globally within your whole application. In JAVA, Spring Boot provides controller advice annotation to allow you intercept errors and process them in a central place. First, you design and implement a set of customized exception classes. Second, when you capture any exception in one of your modules, you log the error message and re-throw an mapped business exception you implemented. Last, create your exception handling class (annotated with @ControllerAdvice), and implement the handler for each domain exception.

One effective approach is to implement data validation in your models. By doing so, you can ensure data integrity and security. Validating inputs and enforcing constraints will help prevent errors and maintain the quality of your code. Another essential aspect is creating standardized error-handling mechanisms in your controllers. This allows you to gracefully handle and report errors to users while also logging them for debugging purposes. By having a robust error-handling system in place, you can quickly identify and resolve issues, improving the overall reliability of your server-side code.

Performance is important, but for most applications it doesn't matter whether you use a linked list or an array. For web applications, most performance issues I have seen tend to relate to I/O and perhaps most often the database. N+1 queries, missing indexes and nested SQL queries are some of the usual suspects. Keep performance in mind while developing and reviewing, but don't sacrifice code maintainability. You will often not know where it is truly worth optimizing until your code has been run under load in production, so make sure to include tools for measuring performance early. While hyperbolic, it is useful to remind oneself of the famous Donald Knuth quote every once in a while: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil"

I can't recommend implementing caching strategies enough. Using products like Redis, Memcached or Varnish can drastically improve page load speed. Why make a trip to the database on every page load if the data rarely changes? Fetch it once and drop it in the cache - make your server-side code "smart" enough to detect changes in the data to trigger a cache refresh. Utilizing a CDN should also be standard practice at this point as well. Save as much server "bandwidth" and resources to handle the business logic and computational requirements - not serving up static content like images, videos, JavaScript files, etc.

Prometheus and Grafana are highly recommended. They can be used to monitor kubernetes pods CPU and memory usage almost "out of the box"

Well, Google PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse primarily focus on web page performance analysis and optimization, New Relic is a more comprehensive APM and observability platform that covers broader aspects of application performance, including server-side components and infrastructure. The choice between these tools depends on the specific needs of your project and whether you require a dedicated web page performance analysis or a more extensive application performance monitoring solution.

Authentication and Authorization are the corner stone of security. Authentication should be implemented with JWT and a refresh token. Authorization should be policy based. An easy way to do that is using Open Policy Agent

One of the key solutions to ensuring reliable server-side code is implementing robust authentication and authorization mechanisms. By doing so, we can control access to our application's resources and prevent unauthorized access or malicious activities. This adds an extra layer of security to our codebase and protects our valuable data.

An overlooked attack vector that is gaining a lot of traction nowadays is software supply chain attacks. Be aware of what dependencies you are consuming, source them from trusted sources and consume dependencies that come from trusted companies, communities or individuals. When something can already be done by your platform's standard libraries, avoid depending on third party libraries.

Keep it simple. Simplicity forces you to reduce boilerplate, reduces the attack surface, might improve build, deploy, and runtime performance.

Write code/application breaking APIs. Invoke them so that they intentionally try to break the system functionality. Do this activity in a near real prod environment. This will help you to determine 2 things: 1. How well is your application written to handle such failures in prod. 2. How well are your application logs written to help you with real error messages. Once you have both, you can work on your application to address the issues you find. Do it repetitively to ensure any unexpected failure doesn’t fail your application and such failures are gracefully handled and the application owners informed.

I would highly recommend: 1. Use the microservices architecture. 2. Use Kubernetes. 3. Use a CI/CD pipeline. 4. Use a 3rd party service for authentication. 5. Implement policy based authorization using Open Policy Agent. 6. Use Coralogix for centralized logging. 7. Use ORM and implement migrations when using rational databases

Apply code reviews as a good way to verify code changes and teach a common codestyle and quality level throughout the team. Create an atmosphere where the seniors teach the juniors and the juniors (try to) outsmart the seniors. Combine pull requests with an automatized quality gate including: - static code analysis, to catch obvious mistakes and shorten the review time - unittests and an agreed code coverage

Consider tools that provide visibility into the runtime behavior of your application. This includes function tracing, logging, and metrics. OpenTelemetry defines a set of standards to collect and format this type of data for use with a wide variety of performance monitoring tools such as DataDog, New Relic, Honeycomb, Lightstep, or open source tools such as Zipkin, Jaeger, Prometheus and OpenObserve.