Alternatives to Quora logo

Alternatives to Quora

Swift, Dropbox, Medium, Postman, and Postman are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Quora.
83
13

What is Quora and what are its top alternatives?

It connects you to everything you want to know about. Quora aims to be the easiest place to write new content and share content from the web. We organize people and their interests so you can find, collect and share the information most valuable to you.
Quora is a tool in the Question and Answer Sites category of a tech stack.

Top Alternatives to Quora

  • Swift
    Swift

    Writing code is interactive and fun, the syntax is concise yet expressive, and apps run lightning-fast. Swift is ready for your next iOS and OS X project — or for addition into your current app — because Swift code works side-by-side with Objective-C. ...

  • Dropbox
    Dropbox

    Harness the power of Dropbox. Connect to an account, upload, download, search, and more. ...

  • Medium
    Medium

    Medium is a different kind of place on the internet. A place where the measure of success isn’t views, but viewpoints. Where the quality of the idea matters, not the author’s qualifications. A place where conversation pushes ideas forward. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • Postman
    Postman

    It is the only complete API development environment, used by nearly five million developers and more than 100,000 companies worldwide. ...

  • Stack Overflow
    Stack Overflow

    Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming. ...

  • Google Maps
    Google Maps

    Create rich applications and stunning visualisations of your data, leveraging the comprehensiveness, accuracy, and usability of Google Maps and a modern web platform that scales as you grow. ...

  • Elasticsearch
    Elasticsearch

    Elasticsearch is a distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine capable of storing data and searching it in near real time. Elasticsearch, Kibana, Beats and Logstash are the Elastic Stack (sometimes called the ELK Stack). ...

Quora alternatives & related posts

Swift logo

Swift

20.2K
13.4K
1.3K
An innovative new programming language for Cocoa and Cocoa Touch.
20.2K
13.4K
+ 1
1.3K
PROS OF SWIFT
  • 259
    Ios
  • 180
    Elegant
  • 126
    Not Objective-C
  • 107
    Backed by apple
  • 93
    Type inference
  • 61
    Generics
  • 54
    Playgrounds
  • 49
    Semicolon free
  • 38
    OSX
  • 36
    Tuples offer compound variables
  • 24
    Clean Syntax
  • 24
    Easy to learn
  • 22
    Open Source
  • 21
    Beautiful Code
  • 20
    Functional
  • 12
    Dynamic
  • 12
    Linux
  • 11
    Protocol-oriented programming
  • 10
    Promotes safe, readable code
  • 9
    No S-l-o-w JVM
  • 8
    Explicit optionals
  • 7
    Storyboard designer
  • 6
    Optionals
  • 6
    Type safety
  • 5
    Super addicting language, great people, open, elegant
  • 5
    Best UI concept
  • 4
    Its friendly
  • 4
    Highly Readable codes
  • 4
    Fail-safe
  • 4
    Powerful
  • 4
    Faster and looks better
  • 4
    Swift is faster than Objective-C
  • 4
    Feels like a better C++
  • 3
    Easy to learn and work
  • 3
    Much more fun
  • 3
    Protocol extensions
  • 3
    Native
  • 3
    Its fun and damn fast
  • 3
    Strong Type safety
  • 3
    Easy to Maintain
  • 2
    Protocol as type
  • 2
    All Cons C# and Java Swift Already has
  • 2
    Esay
  • 2
    MacOS
  • 2
    Type Safe
  • 2
    Protocol oriented programming
  • 1
    Can interface with C easily
  • 1
    Actually don't have to own a mac
  • 1
    Free from Memory Leak
  • 1
    Swift is easier to understand for non-iOS developers.
  • 1
    Numbers with underbar
  • 1
    Optional chain
  • 1
    Great for Multi-Threaded Programming
  • 1
    Runs Python 8 times faster
  • 1
    Objec
CONS OF SWIFT
  • 6
    Must own a mac
  • 2
    Memory leaks are not uncommon
  • 1
    Very irritatingly picky about things that’s
  • 1
    Complicated process for exporting modules
  • 1
    Its classes compile to roughly 300 lines of assembly
  • 1
    Is a lot more effort than lua to make simple functions
  • 0
    Overly complex options makes it easy to create bad code

related Swift posts

Shivam Bhargava
AVP - Business at VAYUZ Technologies Pvt. Ltd. · | 22 upvotes · 866.9K views

Hi Community! Trust everyone is keeping safe. I am exploring the idea of building a #Neobank (App) with end-to-end banking capabilities. In the process of exploring this space, I have come across multiple Apps (N26, Revolut, Monese, etc) and explored their stacks in detail. The confusion remains to be the Backend Tech to be used?

What would you go with considering all of the languages such as Node.js Java Rails Python are suggested by some person or the other. As a general trend, I have noticed the usage of Node with React on the front or Node with a combination of Kotlin and Swift. Please suggest what would be the right approach!

See more
Conor Myhrvold
Tech Brand Mgr, Office of CTO at Uber · | 13 upvotes · 2.1M views

Excerpts from how we developed (and subsequently open sourced) Uber's cross-platform mobile architecture framework, RIBs , going from Objective-C to Swift in the process for iOS: https://github.com/uber/RIBs

Uber’s new application architecture (RIBs) extensively uses protocols to keep its various components decoupled and testable. We used this architecture for the first time in our new rider application and moved our primary language from Objective-C to Swift. Since Swift is a very static language, unit testing became problematic. Dynamic languages have good frameworks to build test mocks, stubs, or stand-ins by dynamically creating or modifying existing concrete classes.

Needless to say, we were not very excited about the additional complexity of manually writing and maintaining mock implementations for each of our thousands of protocols.

The information required to generate mock classes already exists in the Swift protocol. For Uber’s use case, we set out to create tooling that would let engineers automatically generate test mocks for any protocol they wanted by simply annotating them.

The iOS codebase for our rider application alone incorporates around 1,500 of these generated mocks. Without our code generation tool, all of these would have to be written and maintained by hand, which would have made testing much more time-intensive. Auto-generated mocks have contributed a lot to the unit test coverage that we have today.

We built these code generation tools ourselves for a number of reasons, including that there weren’t many open source tools available at the time we started our effort. Today, there are some great open source tools to generate resource accessors, like SwiftGen. And Sourcery can help you with generic code generation needs:

https://eng.uber.com/code-generation/ https://eng.uber.com/driver-app-ribs-architecture/

(GitHub : https://github.com/uber/RIBs )

See more
Dropbox logo

Dropbox

23.3K
18.2K
1.7K
Build the power of Dropbox into your apps
23.3K
18.2K
+ 1
1.7K
PROS OF DROPBOX
  • 434
    Easy to work with
  • 256
    Free
  • 216
    Popular
  • 176
    Shared file hosting
  • 167
    'just works'
  • 100
    No brainer
  • 79
    Integration with external services
  • 76
    Simple
  • 49
    Good api
  • 38
    Least cost (free) for the basic needs case
  • 11
    It just works
  • 8
    Convenient
  • 7
    Accessible from all of my devices
  • 5
    Command Line client
  • 4
    Synchronizing laptop and desktop - work anywhere
  • 4
    Can even be used by your grandma
  • 3
    Reliable
  • 3
    Sync API
  • 3
    Mac app
  • 3
    Cross platform app
  • 2
    Ability to pay monthly without losing your files
  • 2
    Delta synchronization
  • 2
    Everybody needs to share and synchronize files reliably
  • 2
    Backups, local and cloud
  • 2
    Extended version history
  • 2
    Beautiful UI
  • 1
    YC Company
  • 1
    What a beautiful app
  • 1
    Easy/no setup
  • 1
    So easy
  • 1
    The more the merrier
  • 1
    Easy to work with
  • 1
    For when client needs file without opening firewall
  • 1
    Everybody needs to share and synchronize files reliabl
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 1
    Official Linux app
  • 0
    The more the merrier
CONS OF DROPBOX
  • 3
    Personal vs company account is confusing
  • 1
    Replication kills CPU and battery

related Dropbox posts

Shared insights
on
Google DriveGoogle DriveDropboxDropbox

I created a simple upload/download functionality for a web application and connected it to Mongo, now I can upload, store and download files. I need advice on how to create a SPA similar to Dropbox or Google Drive in that it will be a hierarchy of folders with files within them, how would I go about creating this structure and adding this functionality to all the files within the application?

Intuitively creating a react component and adding it to a File object seems like the way to go, what are some issues to expect and how do I go about creating such an application to be as fast and UI-friendly as possible?

See more
Shared insights
on
BoxBoxDropboxDropboxKloudlessKloudless

Anyone recommend a good connector like Kloudless for connecting a SaaS app to Dropbox/Box etc? Cheers

See more
Medium logo

Medium

768
690
190
The perfect place to read and write.
768
690
+ 1
190
PROS OF MEDIUM
  • 61
    Beautiful UI
  • 34
    Typography
  • 15
    Network effect
  • 12
    Embedding videos, tweets, vines
  • 12
    Great mobile app
  • 11
    Simple, yet elegant and appealing UX
  • 10
    Notes
  • 9
    Word counter
  • 7
    Easy to gain traction
  • 4
    Idealized media consumption
  • 3
    Inline Comments & Discussions
  • 3
    Beautiful design. great content, excellent experience
  • 2
    Version history
  • 2
    Nice UI and UX
  • 2
    Embed medium
  • 2
    Recommendations
  • 1
    Daily Digest
CONS OF MEDIUM
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Medium posts

    Postman logo

    Postman

    94.3K
    80.8K
    1.8K
    Only complete API development environment
    94.3K
    80.8K
    + 1
    1.8K
    PROS OF POSTMAN
    • 490
      Easy to use
    • 369
      Great tool
    • 276
      Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
    • 156
      Easy setup, looks good
    • 144
      The best api workflow out there
    • 53
      It's the best
    • 53
      History feature
    • 44
      Adds real value to my workflow
    • 43
      Great interface that magically predicts your needs
    • 35
      The best in class app
    • 12
      Can save and share script
    • 10
      Fully featured without looking cluttered
    • 8
      Collections
    • 8
      Option to run scrips
    • 8
      Global/Environment Variables
    • 7
      Shareable Collections
    • 7
      Dead simple and useful. Excellent
    • 7
      Dark theme easy on the eyes
    • 6
      Awesome customer support
    • 6
      Great integration with newman
    • 5
      Documentation
    • 5
      Simple
    • 5
      The test script is useful
    • 4
      Saves responses
    • 4
      This has simplified my testing significantly
    • 4
      Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
    • 4
      Easy as pie
    • 3
      API-network
    • 3
      I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
    • 3
      Mocking API calls with predefined response
    • 2
      Now supports GraphQL
    • 2
      Postman Runner CI Integration
    • 2
      Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
    • 2
      Continuous integration using newman
    • 2
      Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
    • 2
      Runner
    • 2
      Graph
    • 1
      <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
    CONS OF POSTMAN
    • 10
      Stores credentials in HTTP
    • 9
      Bloated features and UI
    • 8
      Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
    • 7
      Poor GraphQL support
    • 5
      Expensive
    • 3
      Not free after 5 users
    • 3
      Can't prompt for per-request variables
    • 1
      Import swagger
    • 1
      Support websocket
    • 1
      Import curl

    related Postman posts

    Noah Zoschke
    Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 2.9M views

    We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

    Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

    Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

    This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

    Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

    Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

    Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5M views

    Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

    • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
    • npm as package manager
    • NestJS as Node.js framework
    • TypeScript as programming language
    • ExpressJS as web server
    • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
    • Postman as a tool for API development
    • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
    • JSON Web Token for access token management

    The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

    • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
    • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
    • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
    • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
    See more
    Postman logo

    Postman

    94.3K
    80.8K
    1.8K
    Only complete API development environment
    94.3K
    80.8K
    + 1
    1.8K
    PROS OF POSTMAN
    • 490
      Easy to use
    • 369
      Great tool
    • 276
      Makes developing rest api's easy peasy
    • 156
      Easy setup, looks good
    • 144
      The best api workflow out there
    • 53
      It's the best
    • 53
      History feature
    • 44
      Adds real value to my workflow
    • 43
      Great interface that magically predicts your needs
    • 35
      The best in class app
    • 12
      Can save and share script
    • 10
      Fully featured without looking cluttered
    • 8
      Collections
    • 8
      Option to run scrips
    • 8
      Global/Environment Variables
    • 7
      Shareable Collections
    • 7
      Dead simple and useful. Excellent
    • 7
      Dark theme easy on the eyes
    • 6
      Awesome customer support
    • 6
      Great integration with newman
    • 5
      Documentation
    • 5
      Simple
    • 5
      The test script is useful
    • 4
      Saves responses
    • 4
      This has simplified my testing significantly
    • 4
      Makes testing API's as easy as 1,2,3
    • 4
      Easy as pie
    • 3
      API-network
    • 3
      I'd recommend it to everyone who works with apis
    • 3
      Mocking API calls with predefined response
    • 2
      Now supports GraphQL
    • 2
      Postman Runner CI Integration
    • 2
      Easy to setup, test and provides test storage
    • 2
      Continuous integration using newman
    • 2
      Pre-request Script and Test attributes are invaluable
    • 2
      Runner
    • 2
      Graph
    • 1
      <a href="http://fixbit.com/">useful tool</a>
    CONS OF POSTMAN
    • 10
      Stores credentials in HTTP
    • 9
      Bloated features and UI
    • 8
      Cumbersome to switch authentication tokens
    • 7
      Poor GraphQL support
    • 5
      Expensive
    • 3
      Not free after 5 users
    • 3
      Can't prompt for per-request variables
    • 1
      Import swagger
    • 1
      Support websocket
    • 1
      Import curl

    related Postman posts

    Noah Zoschke
    Engineering Manager at Segment · | 30 upvotes · 2.9M views

    We just launched the Segment Config API (try it out for yourself here) — a set of public REST APIs that enable you to manage your Segment configuration. A public API is only as good as its #documentation. For the API reference doc we are using Postman.

    Postman is an “API development environment”. You download the desktop app, and build API requests by URL and payload. Over time you can build up a set of requests and organize them into a “Postman Collection”. You can generalize a collection with “collection variables”. This allows you to parameterize things like username, password and workspace_name so a user can fill their own values in before making an API call. This makes it possible to use Postman for one-off API tasks instead of writing code.

    Then you can add Markdown content to the entire collection, a folder of related methods, and/or every API method to explain how the APIs work. You can publish a collection and easily share it with a URL.

    This turns Postman from a personal #API utility to full-blown public interactive API documentation. The result is a great looking web page with all the API calls, docs and sample requests and responses in one place. Check out the results here.

    Postman’s powers don’t end here. You can automate Postman with “test scripts” and have it periodically run a collection scripts as “monitors”. We now have #QA around all the APIs in public docs to make sure they are always correct

    Along the way we tried other techniques for documenting APIs like ReadMe.io or Swagger UI. These required a lot of effort to customize.

    Writing and maintaining a Postman collection takes some work, but the resulting documentation site, interactivity and API testing tools are well worth it.

    See more
    Simon Reymann
    Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 5M views

    Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

    • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
    • npm as package manager
    • NestJS as Node.js framework
    • TypeScript as programming language
    • ExpressJS as web server
    • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
    • Postman as a tool for API development
    • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
    • JSON Web Token for access token management

    The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

    • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
    • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
    • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
    • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
    See more
    Stack Overflow logo

    Stack Overflow

    68.9K
    60.9K
    893
    Question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers
    68.9K
    60.9K
    + 1
    893
    PROS OF STACK OVERFLOW
    • 257
      Scary smart community
    • 206
      Knows all
    • 142
      Voting system
    • 134
      Good questions
    • 83
      Good SEO
    • 22
      Addictive
    • 14
      Tight focus
    • 10
      Share and gain knowledge
    • 7
      Useful
    • 3
      Fast loading
    • 2
      Gamification
    • 1
      Knows everyone
    • 1
      Experts share experience and answer questions
    • 1
      Stack overflow to developers As google to net surfers
    • 1
      Questions answered quickly
    • 1
      No annoying ads
    • 1
      No spam
    • 1
      Fast community response
    • 1
      Good moderators
    • 1
      Quick answers from users
    • 1
      Good answers
    • 1
      User reputation ranking
    • 1
      Efficient answers
    • 1
      Leading developer community
    CONS OF STACK OVERFLOW
    • 3
      Not welcoming to newbies
    • 3
      Unfair downvoting
    • 3
      Unfriendly moderators
    • 3
      No opinion based questions
    • 3
      Mean users
    • 2
      Limited to types of questions it can accept

    related Stack Overflow posts

    Tom Klein

    Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

    See more
    Google Maps logo

    Google Maps

    41.3K
    28.8K
    567
    Build highly customisable maps with your own content and imagery
    41.3K
    28.8K
    + 1
    567
    PROS OF GOOGLE MAPS
    • 253
      Free
    • 136
      Address input through maps api
    • 82
      Sharable Directions
    • 47
      Google Earth
    • 46
      Unique
    • 3
      Custom maps designing
    CONS OF GOOGLE MAPS
    • 4
      Google Attributions and logo
    • 1
      Only map allowed alongside google place autocomplete

    related Google Maps posts

    Tom Klein

    Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. To debug our software and ask questions, we love to use Postman and Stack Overflow. Google Drive helps our team to share documents. We're able to build our great products through the APIs by Google Maps, CloudFlare, Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Let's Encrypt, and TensorFlow.

    See more

    A huge component of our product relies on gathering public data about locations of interest. Google Places API gives us that ability in the most efficient way. Since we are primarily going to be using as google data as a source of information for our MVP, we might as well start integrating the Google Places API in our system. We have worked with Google Maps in the past and we might take some inspiration from our previous projects onto this one.

    See more
    Elasticsearch logo

    Elasticsearch

    34.5K
    26.8K
    1.6K
    Open Source, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine
    34.5K
    26.8K
    + 1
    1.6K
    PROS OF ELASTICSEARCH
    • 328
      Powerful api
    • 315
      Great search engine
    • 231
      Open source
    • 214
      Restful
    • 200
      Near real-time search
    • 98
      Free
    • 85
      Search everything
    • 54
      Easy to get started
    • 45
      Analytics
    • 26
      Distributed
    • 6
      Fast search
    • 5
      More than a search engine
    • 4
      Great docs
    • 4
      Awesome, great tool
    • 3
      Highly Available
    • 3
      Easy to scale
    • 2
      Potato
    • 2
      Document Store
    • 2
      Great customer support
    • 2
      Intuitive API
    • 2
      Nosql DB
    • 2
      Great piece of software
    • 2
      Reliable
    • 2
      Fast
    • 2
      Easy setup
    • 1
      Open
    • 1
      Easy to get hot data
    • 1
      Github
    • 1
      Elaticsearch
    • 1
      Actively developing
    • 1
      Responsive maintainers on GitHub
    • 1
      Ecosystem
    • 1
      Not stable
    • 1
      Scalability
    • 0
      Community
    CONS OF ELASTICSEARCH
    • 7
      Resource hungry
    • 6
      Diffecult to get started
    • 5
      Expensive
    • 4
      Hard to keep stable at large scale

    related Elasticsearch posts

    Tim Abbott

    We've been using PostgreSQL since the very early days of Zulip, but we actually didn't use it from the beginning. Zulip started out as a MySQL project back in 2012, because we'd heard it was a good choice for a startup with a wide community. However, we found that even though we were using the Django ORM for most of our database access, we spent a lot of time fighting with MySQL. Issues ranged from bad collation defaults, to bad query plans which required a lot of manual query tweaks.

    We ended up getting so frustrated that we tried out PostgresQL, and the results were fantastic. We didn't have to do any real customization (just some tuning settings for how big a server we had), and all of our most important queries were faster out of the box. As a result, we were able to delete a bunch of custom queries escaping the ORM that we'd written to make the MySQL query planner happy (because postgres just did the right thing automatically).

    And then after that, we've just gotten a ton of value out of postgres. We use its excellent built-in full-text search, which has helped us avoid needing to bring in a tool like Elasticsearch, and we've really enjoyed features like its partial indexes, which saved us a lot of work adding unnecessary extra tables to get good performance for things like our "unread messages" and "starred messages" indexes.

    I can't recommend it highly enough.

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    Tymoteusz Paul
    Devops guy at X20X Development LTD · | 23 upvotes · 9.7M views

    Often enough I have to explain my way of going about setting up a CI/CD pipeline with multiple deployment platforms. Since I am a bit tired of yapping the same every single time, I've decided to write it up and share with the world this way, and send people to read it instead ;). I will explain it on "live-example" of how the Rome got built, basing that current methodology exists only of readme.md and wishes of good luck (as it usually is ;)).

    It always starts with an app, whatever it may be and reading the readmes available while Vagrant and VirtualBox is installing and updating. Following that is the first hurdle to go over - convert all the instruction/scripts into Ansible playbook(s), and only stopping when doing a clear vagrant up or vagrant reload we will have a fully working environment. As our Vagrant environment is now functional, it's time to break it! This is the moment to look for how things can be done better (too rigid/too lose versioning? Sloppy environment setup?) and replace them with the right way to do stuff, one that won't bite us in the backside. This is the point, and the best opportunity, to upcycle the existing way of doing dev environment to produce a proper, production-grade product.

    I should probably digress here for a moment and explain why. I firmly believe that the way you deploy production is the same way you should deploy develop, shy of few debugging-friendly setting. This way you avoid the discrepancy between how production work vs how development works, which almost always causes major pains in the back of the neck, and with use of proper tools should mean no more work for the developers. That's why we start with Vagrant as developer boxes should be as easy as vagrant up, but the meat of our product lies in Ansible which will do meat of the work and can be applied to almost anything: AWS, bare metal, docker, LXC, in open net, behind vpn - you name it.

    We must also give proper consideration to monitoring and logging hoovering at this point. My generic answer here is to grab Elasticsearch, Kibana, and Logstash. While for different use cases there may be better solutions, this one is well battle-tested, performs reasonably and is very easy to scale both vertically (within some limits) and horizontally. Logstash rules are easy to write and are well supported in maintenance through Ansible, which as I've mentioned earlier, are at the very core of things, and creating triggers/reports and alerts based on Elastic and Kibana is generally a breeze, including some quite complex aggregations.

    If we are happy with the state of the Ansible it's time to move on and put all those roles and playbooks to work. Namely, we need something to manage our CI/CD pipelines. For me, the choice is obvious: TeamCity. It's modern, robust and unlike most of the light-weight alternatives, it's transparent. What I mean by that is that it doesn't tell you how to do things, doesn't limit your ways to deploy, or test, or package for that matter. Instead, it provides a developer-friendly and rich playground for your pipelines. You can do most the same with Jenkins, but it has a quite dated look and feel to it, while also missing some key functionality that must be brought in via plugins (like quality REST API which comes built-in with TeamCity). It also comes with all the common-handy plugins like Slack or Apache Maven integration.

    The exact flow between CI and CD varies too greatly from one application to another to describe, so I will outline a few rules that guide me in it: 1. Make build steps as small as possible. This way when something breaks, we know exactly where, without needing to dig and root around. 2. All security credentials besides development environment must be sources from individual Vault instances. Keys to those containers should exist only on the CI/CD box and accessible by a few people (the less the better). This is pretty self-explanatory, as anything besides dev may contain sensitive data and, at times, be public-facing. Because of that appropriate security must be present. TeamCity shines in this department with excellent secrets-management. 3. Every part of the build chain shall consume and produce artifacts. If it creates nothing, it likely shouldn't be its own build. This way if any issue shows up with any environment or version, all developer has to do it is grab appropriate artifacts to reproduce the issue locally. 4. Deployment builds should be directly tied to specific Git branches/tags. This enables much easier tracking of what caused an issue, including automated identifying and tagging the author (nothing like automated regression testing!).

    Speaking of deployments, I generally try to keep it simple but also with a close eye on the wallet. Because of that, I am more than happy with AWS or another cloud provider, but also constantly peeking at the loads and do we get the value of what we are paying for. Often enough the pattern of use is not constantly erratic, but rather has a firm baseline which could be migrated away from the cloud and into bare metal boxes. That is another part where this approach strongly triumphs over the common Docker and CircleCI setup, where you are very much tied in to use cloud providers and getting out is expensive. Here to embrace bare-metal hosting all you need is a help of some container-based self-hosting software, my personal preference is with Proxmox and LXC. Following that all you must write are ansible scripts to manage hardware of Proxmox, similar way as you do for Amazon EC2 (ansible supports both greatly) and you are good to go. One does not exclude another, quite the opposite, as they can live in great synergy and cut your costs dramatically (the heavier your base load, the bigger the savings) while providing production-grade resiliency.

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