Data challenges in app development arise due to the large volumes of data, their ever-changing speed, and other complexities. Understanding data processing and storage technologies is vital for app development success. Developers plan each application’s functionality and related data processes, needs, approaches, and tool combinations in order to make the right architecture and design decisions. Designing new applications also requires consideration of nonfunctional requirements such as scalability, reliability, performance, and maintenance.

Krasamo’s skilled developers design supportive data systems with APIs (code) to perform consistently. Through experience, we have learned the most effective techniques and patterns for building mobile apps, and we have adopted best practices to build quality apps with faster delivery to production.

App Development Integrates With Architecture Of Data Systems 

Choosing the appropriate data model and understanding how to implement it is a key decision to make early in the agile development process, as this affects the app’s functionality. First, we must see how the data model fits the app requirements and assumptions in order to best structure the data. Data is structured by considering the interrelationship of data items and the efforts or complexities of the app’s code. The type of data relationship or purpose determines the data model or mixed model. The most common data model types are relational (SQL) or non-relational (NoSQL) datastores, documents, and graph-based models.

We must define the data, the layers, and how the data model will represent this—also, we must answer questions relating to how we will store the data and how the mobile application will access the data. Data models must be suitable for the individual use case and be capable of adapting the app to changing requirements. Building data relationships, code access paths, and technical details on how to structure and query data is critical for success. Contact an app consulting team for more information on how this technology can be utilized to improve your company’s functionality and effectiveness in the marketplace.

Mobile apps require code to build a supporting data system with a data model implementation that synchronizes interactions with data formats (JSON, XML) and schemas for encoding data, search indexing, caching, etc. There is plenty of development work to ensure that the mobile app performs to satisfy the expected user experience. An app development engineer completes an evaluation with the client and gives special treatment to each case to deliver performance and develop a system considering scalability and long-term maintenance.

Building data-intensive apps requires various components to perform the desired functions while considering high data volume, loading parameters, latency, and response times. Sometimes components fail, and the system must be tolerant (fault-tolerant system) to handle faults with established continuous testing and other techniques. DevOps teams continuously monitor and track failures with ready strategies for restoring services.

At Krasamo, we practice development in sandbox environments, manual and automated testing, monitoring, and architectures that can handle appropriate load levels. Also, distributing the loads can be done with elastic computing resources or manual scaling. There are many issues about data volume that can determine the scalability of the system’s architecture. We design systems to handle specific data throughput loads and leave the options open to scale with their corresponding assumptions or anticipate new requirements. Mobile app development teams must keep in mind simplicity and maintenance recommendations for easy operations and future evolution.

Simplifying the system can be done by implementing abstractions of components and hiding their complexities to reuse them later, improving the quality of the data system and its ability to adapt to new requirements. Building a robust data architecture is necessary for synchronizing data from several sources and applications to provide a seamless experience for users. Integrating mobile apps to the architecture of data systems is fundamental, as is keeping a clean data model and simple app code. Data models allow searching data using frameworks or query languages such as SQL. Then, developers build (code) and query access paths to retrieve data.

App Development and Storage Engines

Choosing an adequate storage engine for the type of workloads ahead is strategic for your app development efforts. Databases store and retrieve information (data) for performing transactions; likewise, data analytics requires creating or choosing an index to help find the data. Creating a good index structure improves the querying process from the main database, balancing query speed and data read and write patterns. Krasamo developers monitor the indexing strategy and approach and create query interfaces (SQL interfaces) that take into consideration your system limitations.

App Developers Plan How to Move Data to a Data Warehouse

Another aspect of app development and data systems relates to querying the company processing data or analytics data to evaluate how data is extracted, transformed, and loaded (ETL process) into a data warehouse. Using a data warehouse provides sufficient bandwidth and is convenient for optimizing data retrieval patterns.

App development teams must consider the app’s needs, data models, data encoding methods, and schema design (cluster architecture) or schema migrations, among other factors. We discuss storage engines and tools with each client, depending on the type of workloads, access patterns, and application requirements.

Planning of Data Compatibility for App Development

Data applications change; they need to be upgraded frequently and share information with other systems (data flow). Usually, applications are deployed to new versions but their databases are encoded with older schema versions that require an encoding format or encoding byte sequence (binary encoding or serialization) in specific forms to have compatibility (forward and backward compatibility).

Several approaches are available for processing encoded data flows through databases or services, including REST API, RPC, and asynchronous (message brokers), for example. These methods vary in configurations and implementation and can determine the application evolution within the data system. Also, programming languages and formats (JSON, XML, CVS) can have implications when encoding data.

Talk to your app development team about how data flows and how API versions work, or check schema compatibility, decoding (parsing), and suggested tooling. App development for data applications requires a unique skill set for data structuring, integration plans, partners, and technologies.

Cloud App Development and Distributed Databases

The databases of medium to large operations must run across multiple machines and distribute data in several locations (datastores) to reduce failure risks, reduce latency, or increase query capacity. But storing data in several locations can lead to complexities when handling changes. Data changes must be replicated across networks with other connected machines or nodes to keep the information updated.

App Developers Consider Data Replication Systems—Replication Topology

Databases can be configured to replicate data using a mix of asynchronous or synchronous communication in order to have copies (replicas) of the data in the networked machines or nodes and process changes continuously. Krasamo can help choose the best approach for your use case during the app development planning phase.

By coding or picking a built-in database replication approach (replication mode or algorithm), we create a stream for replicating data consistently across nodes. A common approach is using the leader-based replication form, in which data is written only in the leader database and replicated to the other databases (followers).

Data change streams use a log system to log statements (write requests), track any changes, and catch up or restore from their last transaction in case of node failures (crashes). The log system helps build replicas of data structures from the storage engine. For more complex systems with multiple data centers or offline operations, you can use the multi-leader or leaderless replication methods as options for specific use cases. Our app developers can give you a good assessment of process consistency, conflict resolution, and other technical design choices.

Krasamo’s app developers will consider your app-specific requirements and replication characteristics in order to create custom code to execute specific transactions in the database and send data to other applications.

Data systems can manage datasets using partitions to distribute loads or execute queries in several nodes. App developers can implement several partition schemes and combine them with replication schemes. Also, other technical operations such as rebalance partitions and routing queries can be considered.

System administrators set up approaches and handle leader–follower relationships and failure issues (failovers), reconfigure new leaders, shut down nodes, and manage network issues, concurrency issues, conflict resolution, and coordination with other databases. Some apps with complex access patterns may require coding transactions (abstraction layers) with logic of database reads and writes to access the database.

App development efforts focus on designing reliable and fault-tolerant systems, as well as contemplating partial failures and expected system behaviors (assumptions). A challenge for developers is the configuration of network topologies and how the system reacts to and recovers from failures, application crashes, or detecting faults. Developers routinely make decisions and trade-offs to overcome problems and know how to handle expected loads in network queuing, including congestions and delays, timeouts, and variability of delays.

App development requires defining the system model and having clear assumptions about the system behavior and how to optimize resources. The system model is defined by considering assumptions about the timing and how nodes fail in specific situations—solving problems logically while managing app implementation and partial failures.

Design Data Processing Systems For App Development

Designing data systems for app development projects involves numerous considerations regarding the processing systems’ performance. For example:

• Online interactive Processing Systems. Online systems trigger a request and wait for a response (request/response style). This system measures performance by service response time.
• Offline/Batch Processing System. Batch processing systems process a large amount of fixed data that run periodically and measures the time to run a job (batch) and the size of the dataset (throughput).
• Stream Processing Systems/Near Real-Time. Stream processing systems process inputs of data and produce outputs following an event.

Choosing the right computation approach for integrating data and algorithms to perform operations and improve reliability, as well as understanding the tools and trade-offs, is critical to designing the correct solution for your app and data architecture.

In addition, integration of data systems presents challenges such as building machine learning models, managing enterprise application integration (EAI), and deploying applications in a microservices architecture.