Hi, I'm Zain. I help companies build technology solutions to better serve their customers.

API Gateway

What is an API Gateway? An API Gateway is a API management tool that sits between a client and a bunch of backend APIs. Its primary role is to act as a...

What is a CDN?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a bunch of servers distributed across the world which work together to provide fast delivery of internet content. Why use a CDN? Performance Research from fastly...

Load Balancing for Beginners

What is Load Balancing? Let’s imagine we have a web application on a server (webserver) that’s working fine for 100 users. Users simply go to fabapp.com to access this hypothetical web application....

Proxy Server Explained

A proxy server is just a computer configured in a special way. Using a proxy is just like asking another computer(the proxy) to get the web site you wanted for you. That’s...

What’s the difference between a program, an application and software?

Program A computer program is a list of instructions that tell a computer what to do. A computer program in computer readable form is called machine code. Machine code is binary, a...

Oracle Database Architecture

As a designer we drop a blob onto a piece of graph paper and label it a database server. We never really fully understanding how it works and for the most part...

What is Agile?

Agile is another buzzword that’s been floating around in the technology industry and beyond for a few years now. It is thought to be some new magical way of doing things that...

What is Net Neutrality and why should you care?!

When government and large corporations want us to ignore an issue that will benefit them and be to our detriment they make the issue as hard to understand as possible. For example,...

API vs Web Service

What is an API? API stands for application programming interface. An API is a mechanism by which allow you to write code that allows interaction with another program or application. For example...

SSL vs VPN

What is the difference between SSL and a VPN? Why you would use a VPN when SSL is used everywhere now. Without getting into the finer details of how VPNs and SSL...

Deep Web vs Dark Web

Did you know only a small percentage of the internet is easily accessible via major search engines i.e. indexed by Google etc. The parts of the internet that are not accessible via...

Converged infrastructure simply explained

Things move fast in technology. Yesterday’s buzz word was cloud. It seems we have a new buzz word floating about in enterprise technology. That buzz word is converged infrastructure. Data centre technology...

What is DevOps?

On the theme of buzz words. Here’s another one that’s been around for a little while. No one seems to be able to explain what the hell this is. This is becoming...

What is “The Internet of Things”?

What would happen if you give normal everyday objects like your washing machine, toaster, fridge or light bulb the ability to be connected to a network and talk to other similarly networked...

Simple explanation of NodeJS

NodeJS is a framework (run time environment) that allows you to run programs written in JavaScript. NodeJS is used for creating applications that sit on servers, for example a web server.

What is Mainframe?

Up till now we’ve looked solely at distributed server technology to host business applications. The is another type used within larger organisations and financial institutions, Mainframe technology. What’s the difference between distributed Server technology...

Why Learn Java?

A quick look at some of the advantages of learning Java for someone looking to get into programming: Syntactically (the way Java is written) it’s is similar to a lot of programming...

What is a server platform?

In previous posts such as Linux vs Unix and Types of computer architecture (part 1) we’ve looked at operating systems and types of computer architecture. If you haven’t read these previous posts you may want to....

What is a Relational Database?

In the Types of Database post we looked at different types of databases. This post looks at the most common type of database, the relational database. The concept of the relational database was created...

Types of Database

We looked at different data stores in the Types of Data Store post. Different data stores are suited to different use cases. This post focuses on one type of data store called a database. A database...

Types of Data Store

Data, be it music, pictures or customer information needs to be stored in some sort of …store…a data store if you will! We’ve looked at types of physical storage in the Types of...

Types of Storage

A really really simple guide to types of storage. Local Disk (HDD): A disc or number of discs called platters store data, in the from of “0”s and “1”s, and an arm with...

Linux vs Unix

The words Linux and Unix are used interchangeably by many in technology but what’s the real difference between the two? These are 2 different types of operating system: Linux: is free and open...

Grid computing simply explained

In a previous pose called Clustering simply explained we looked what a cluster was and clustering. Another word/technology that is thrown about and is similar but quite different is grid technology. So let’s have...

Vertical and horizontal scaling simply explained

In this post we look at two terms throw about by systems architects and breakdown what they mean. Scaling vertically and scaling horizontally. Scaling Vertically Adding more resources to the existing server....

Clustering simply explained

What is a cluster? A server working by itself is simply just a server or single node. When you have two or more servers that are designed to do the same thing...

How to virtualize

You’re probably reading this because you want to know what virtualization is or how we virtualization. If you haven’t already you might want to read What is virtualisation?. So hopefully we know what virtualization...

What is virtualisation?

When we traditionally talk about a server we’re talking about a physical computer having a operating system with one or more application/s. Virtualization allows us to separate the hardware (the actual physical...

RTO vs RPO

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are important elements which guide major decisions when designing the architecture for a system but what’s the difference between the two? Let’s take...

CIA Triad

This is a very important IT Security principal. Considering these 3 factors we can help guide the design of a system. Confidentiality How important is it that only people who are suppose to...

Why use N Tier Architecture?

In a previous post N-Tier Architecture we looked at what that was. Great we know what N-Tier Architecture is but what is it good for and why should you use it? Scalable Each tier...