Backend developers are the unsung heroes of our connected world. They’re the ones who power the systems we rely on daily, but they’re often overlooked in favor of those who make things pretty on the front end. But even though they don’t get as much attention as their front-end counterparts, they’re still just as crucial to a project’s success—and their work is as interesting! In this blog post, we’ll cover five tools that every successful backend developer needs to have in their arsenal.
1. Security Composition Analysis
Security Composition Analysis (SCA) is the first tool every backend team needs. It’s what enables you to understand the security risk of your application at each stage of development, and it helps you identify where your app might be vulnerable.
It’s a good idea to use this tool early in your development process so that you can fix any issues before they become a problem—and while they’re easy to fix. And as a bonus, SCA can help prevent bugs and other issues from being introduced into your codebase!
For starters, DevSecOps by JFrog focuses on the entire software development and deployment lifecycle, including security. It includes tools for scanning your codebase for vulnerabilities, creating secure infrastructure, automating tasks like continuous integration, and more.
2. Log Analysis
Log analysis is a critical component in the security of any application. It helps to identify, detect and prevent security incidents by providing a comprehensive view of events that may not be revealed by simple monitoring alone. Logs can also help you identify threats, improve your overall security posture, and better understand how users use your applications.
Log analysis tools collect data from all over an application stack—from database logs to application logs—and provide a central place for managing this vital information. This allows you to analyze the information in real time and after it has been collected, making it easier to spot potential problems long before they become actual problems.
3. Serverless Infrastructure
Serverless computing is a cloud-based computing model that offers a more cost-effective and scalable way to build, deploy and scale applications. It runs code (functions) in response to events or HTTP requests. Serverless computing can be used for both small and large-scale applications.
Serverless computing is also known as FaaS (Function as a Service). The term “serverless” refers to the fact that no servers are involved; you only pay for what you use, so there’s no need to manage infrastructure or provision servers ahead of time. Many providers are available today, including Amazon Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, IBM OpenWhisk, and Oracle Fn Flow.
4. API Management
API management is an essential tool for every backend developer. It helps to improve the quality and security of APIs, manage the lifecycle of APIs, reduce cost, and increase speed.
Here are some reasons why API Management is beneficial for backend developers:
- API management tools help you to monitor and automate the testing process, which saves time and money.
- You can easily create documentation for your APIs with these tools. This will help other developers understand how they work.
- If you have a large number of APIs, then it becomes difficult to maintain them manually because it takes a lot of time and effort. API management tools help you to manage your APIs more efficiently by providing features like security, analytics, monitoring, etc.
5. Event-driven Computing
Event-driven computing is a new approach to software development. It’s a method of scaling applications by using events to trigger actions. This can be a great way to build microservices, but it also has other uses.
For example, event-driven computing is one-way mobile apps can handle large amounts of data and quickly update in real-time. The user does something (like open the app), which causes an event (such as “app opened”) and triggers code that updates something in the app (for example, changing what’s shown on screen).
Event-driven computing has become popular because it can help you scale your application and reduce latency problems when dealing with large amounts of data—and it doesn’t require any special hardware or significant changes from how you would typically write software today.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many tools that backend developers need to use. The good news is that there’s a lot of overlap between them; they don’t all have to be complicated! If you’re interested in learning more about these topics or want to start using one now, check out our blog post on security composition analysis.
