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Web, Mobile, Cloud and Blockchain Solutions

MVP / Product Development

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DevOps Consulting, DevOps Transformation, AWS Managed Services, MS Azure Managed Services, CI/CD Services



DevOps Services

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Grow your tech capabilities with dedicated development teams or extended teams. Your on-demand team is ready.

IT Staffing

From full-stack app development, cloud solutions, blockchain solutions and DevOps services to Machine Learning — we provide end-to-end solutions and support for your business.

What We Do

Everything regarding custom development solutions & so much
more

Stories

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Appstellar is a team of experienced professionals, who excel at solving various business challenges.

Who we are

If you are a highly-motivated individual with a genuine interest in technology, product management and a passion to deliver cutting-edge products, we have the perfect job for you!

We are looking for a talented Solution Owner to work as the software delivery expert for our solutions. As a Solution Owner, you will lead software delivery teams and be the liaison between Product Ownership, Project Governance, and the Development/Implementation Teams. 

Solution Owner

We're looking for a fun new hard-working Full-Stack Software Developer to join this crazy team of ours! You'll be part of a cross-functional team that's responsible for the full development life cycle, from conception to deployment.

More important than specific technical skills is that you're a strong problem solver who loves to learn — we're not experts in everything and we don't expect you to be either.

Full-Stack Developer (2)

We're looking for a fun new hard-working Back-End Developer to join this crazy team of ours! You'll be part of a cross-functional team that's responsible for the full development life cycle, from conception to deployment.

More important than specific technical skills is that you're a strong problem solver who loves to learn — we're not experts in everything and we don't expect you to be either.

Back-End Developer (2)

We're looking for a fun new hard-working Front-End Developer to join this crazy team of ours! You'll be part of a cross-functional team that's responsible for the full development life cycle, from conception to deployment.

More important than specific technical skills is that you're a strong problem solver who loves to learn — we're not experts in everything and we don't expect you to be either.

Front-End Developer (2)

We're looking for a fun new hard-working DevOps Engineer to join this crazy team of ours! 

DevOps is more than just a job. It’s a mindset, a culture, and a strategy whereby the Development and Operations teams work together to write software in small bursts and then integrate, test, monitor, and deploy code in short time periods.

You'll be working alongside our team to help our clients build their cloud infrastructure (Infrastructure as Code) from the ground up.

We love Kubernetes and Infrastructure as Code and we expect you to share the same passion.


DevOps Engineer (2)

Want to join our team?

  Fewer risks, lower costs, higher quality

Ready to Get Your Product Built?

We offer custom software development services for entrepreneurs, start-ups, and enterprises.

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We provide leading-edge infrastructure know-how so you can build tomorrow’s business

Your Kubernetes and DevOps Experts

##  Cilium and eBPF super-powers

Saying Cilium is a service mesh would be all true, but maybe not enough. That’s because of the technology worth mentioning, that makes Cilium known for its efficient and specific solutions. Cilium operates on top of eBPF, which is the successor of BPF, or Classic BPF which makes Linux Kernel programmable. 

We have been told by Thomas Graf CTO and Co-Founder of Isovalent Company which stays behind Cilium, to think of eBPF in Linux Kernel like the JavaScript JIT that runs on browsers. A “eBPF JIT compiler” exists in Kernel Space and executes only safe code making changes as we need in different operations and “syscalls”, making Linux more compact when running container applications. The reason for that is the fast-evolving of containers and microservices technology, which comes with many different needs and at the time when most parts of Linux Kernel were developed, these needs didn’t exist. Why not contribute to the Linux project? Well everyone has different needs, and It would take years to get approved. So when relating for example to security we need patches pretty often, so it wouldn’t be the best choice. 

In my opinion, Cilium really can help us bring our cluster networking, observability, and security to another level!




## GitOps and Flux

GitOps methodology is continuously proving its benefits with the help of different tools out there, including Flux. In KubeCon Europe Virtual 2021 Flux introduced to us the Flux V2 which will support multi-tenancy. Combined with Helm or Kustomize, Flux V2 will give you a very powerful automated state management solution, in other words, a software agent will be ensuring that the desired state of your Kubernetes Cluster which should be available on a VCS is up to date, checking for source code changes in custom intervals, along with different alerts and features for its end-users. 

With all the automation it comes, unfortunately for the users that are aiming to migrate from Flux V1 it comes with a little bit of pain of manual configurations, because of the Flux V2 incompatibility with .flux.yaml files as they will not be supported anymore.




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## WebAssembly

WebAssembly was another hot topic during the event. As we know WebAssembly was build with the browsers to be their main runtime, but lately it is taking place outside the browsers to, because of its security and flexibility. WebAssembly applications are isolated. Can run anywhere, with different operating systems and CPU system architectures. Sounds familiar? Yeah, containers... As Solomon Hykes, founder of Docker said on a tweet: “If WASI (WebAssembly System Interface) existed in 2008 we wouldn’t have needed to create Docker.”


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No container technology is perfect, but they are very good at what they are designed to do and we should choose based on our needs. Comparing WebAssembly to Docker wouldn’t be fair, as they weren’t developed for the same purpose. But WebAssembly seems to have a future in the server-side combined with Kubernetes because of its high security, efficiency, and lightweight features.

## Gateway API

Kubernetes network resources like Ingress and Services, that were part of it from the early days, solved us a lot of problems, but it was quite difficult and some times impossible, to use these resources for more advanced use cases. That resulted in using a lot of annotations and custom resources, which wasn’t a good experience. Gateway API will try to simplify this part of maintenance, saving us time and effort while scaling our applications. 

The Gateway API project defines Kubernetes APIs to configure advanced concepts like traffic splitting, header matching, and load balancing configuration. It comes with new resource types: GatewayClasses, Gateways, and Routes like HTTP Route, TCP Route, UDP Route, and TLS Route. This model of dividing ingress traffic into more specific resources will allow the Gateway API to also expand its protocol support in the future. Do you want more? You can refer to the [Gateway API](https://kubernetes.io/blog/2021/04/22/evolving-kubernetes-networking-with-the-gateway-api/) official documentation!


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So pretty cool yeah, all of these sweet tools at our fingertips. We are thankful to all presenters and organizers for this valuable event, for providing us with many different ideas and better thinking of future implementations. Indirectly providing value also at our partners and customers, giving them the best experience when we integrate these tools and methods in real-world solutions.

By the end, for those who couldn’t attend the event, it is available now on [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cW8_h98sn8&list=PLj6h78yzYM2MqBm19mRz9SYLsw4kfQBrC) with all its sessions and keynotes.

Being one of the most exciting events of the exploding technology nowadays Kubernetes, we couldn’t miss the innovations, methodologies, and best practices that KubeCon Europe Virtual 2021 introduced. As we know, this event brings to us many trending topics in many different areas of Kubernetes and Cloud-Native and a single article wouldn’t be enough! So we are going through only some topics that I found the most interesting and were getting the most attention at the conference.

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Kubecon 2021 Recap & Takeaways

The Covid-19 pandemic has hit everyone and everything really hard and global business is no exception. A [study](https://www.cbi.eu/market-information/outsourcing-itobpo/how-respond-covid-19-it-and-business-process-outsourcing) published by the Centre for the Promotion of Imports, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, showed that clients that were outsourcing before were canceling their non-essential activities and were moving their outsourced tasks back in-house. In a recent [webinar](https://www.cbi.eu/events/webinar-how-respond-covid-19-it-and-business-process-outsourcing), 60% of participants said that Covid-19 has impacted their business in a bad way while only 10% said that they experienced positive effects.

Considering the situation the world is in right now, there is no guarantee that we will go back to normal any time soon. Most countries have started vaccination however, there are countries, even as big and developed as Canada where only 2.13% of the population has been fully vaccinated. With an unpredictable future, it is time that we find long-term solutions that will solve business problems, help businesses stay alive, and keep people from losing their jobs. 

One of the few positive things that we have seen come out of this pandemic is the use of tech solutions. Due to social distancing, we have limited our contact with people to only virtual, teams have had to use communication platforms more than ever, and tech solutions that help with pandemic management have become quite popular. Many countries have developed their version of a tracking app that would help people know if they have been in contact with someone that has tested positive. Apple and Android have even launched their versions of this kind of tracking on their users’ phones as a feature. 

## Tech solutions and Covid-19


Outsourcing your software development has never been easier, necessary, and relevant, and here’s why.

## Software development outsourcing is more relevant with Covid-19


Covid has sent a lot of companies out of business in the past year. With one quick Google search, you can find countless articles on how the pandemic has affected small, medium, and large businesses. Millions of people have had to say goodbye to their workplaces and have been left with no job and nowhere to go.

The pandemic has made cutting costs crucial for every business however, that does not mean your should compromise on quality. Although it is hard to get the best value for money in software development, it certainly is not impossible. When trying to minimize costs during the pandemic, outsourcing certain areas of your development work is a great idea. Outsourcing your software development will not only allow you to receive more for less but will also reduce the development time which will also cut your investment cost.

### Minimizing cost is very important and outsourcing can help with that

Recruitment is one of the most underrated costs of running a business. Although many business owners do not realize this, hiring is costing them a lot of money. Recruiting someone and then waiting for them to get familiarized with the way your business takes quite a long time. According to a study, the [average cost per hire for companies is $4000](https://www.shrm.org/about-shrm/press-room/press-releases/pages/human-capital-benchmarking-report.aspx). 

When outsourcing, you remove the recruiting and onboarding costs from your responsibility altogether. Your vendor will handle the hiring and onboarding or recommend you the perfect people to work on certain projects. Outsourcing makes finding the right people for the job easier and stress-free. This technique is the core of outsourcing and is the perfect alternative to in-house recruitment. 

### Hiring in-house very hard and costly

One of the best things about outsourcing is the option to increase/decrease your team in case requirements change. In times like these and with the great cost of hiring in-house, having this option makes a huge difference. Not only is that more affordable financially, it is also more time effective. Sometimes the need for a new team or additional members will be very time-sensitive.

### Flexible resources equal sustainable operations

The pandemic has increased the need for digital transformation across all businesses. Digital transformations and innovations are one of the few reasons why many businesses have been able to survive the pandemic, some even thrive during it. 

A great example is the brick-and-mortar stores that have moved online. Online shopping hit a high during 2020 and is expected to continue the same way. According to BigCommerce, by 2023, [E-Commerce will make up 22% of global retail sales](https://www.bigcommerce.com/blog/online-shopping-statistics/#ecommerce-is-growing-every-day) while it is only 11% currently.

While the demand for digital transformations is high and rising, most companies do not have the in-house talent and resources to develop these tools. The high demand for IT solutions can be filled perfectly by outsourcing vendors with their experience and knowledge. 

### Digital transformations are necessary


If you find yourself in need of a digital solution for your business, this might be perfect for you. Outsourcing can save you time, cost, and stress. 

Appstellar can help you shape your ideas into products. From full-stack app development, cloud solutions, blockchain solutions, and DevOps services to Machine Learning — we provide end-to-end solutions and support for your business.

For more information please [contact us!](https://appstellar.io/contact)

## How do I outsource my own software?


The Covid-19 pandemic has hit everyone and everything really hard and global business is no exception. A study published by the Centre for the Promotion of Imports, funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, showed that clients that were outsourcing before were canceling their non-essential activities and were moving their outsourced tasks back in-house. In a recent webinar, 60% of participants said that Covid-19 has impacted their business in a bad way while only 10% said that they experienced positive effects.

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