How to build your digital product from scratch

Building a digital product from scratch is definitely not a piece of cake. Exceptional ideas indeed hit you unexpectedly in the middle of life chores. When you finally discover a business model for your idea. But you need to do a lot of homework before kicking it off at the right time. The first step in creating your digital product is that you need to develop a clear understanding of what goes behind in making a backend software architecture. It is a lengthy and hectic process that you always end up forgetting certain things.

This can disrupt the entire development cycle at the later stage when you try to fix all the parts together. To help you avoid such mistakes, here is a software backend development guide for you. You can make a to-do list before jumping straight into the software development stage. So that you never miss an important ingredient in making backend software architecture for a product from scratch.

Let’s get started…

The right language & framework

It is very important to opt for the right language for developing your product. There is no clear-cut guide for what is right and what is wrong when choosing an appropriate language. But the essential part is, your comfort level with any of the languages; be it Javascript or Python. The key to building a strong backend software architecture is to work with the language you are most familiar and comfortable with.

You don’t have to follow languages that are trending in the industry. Just go for what makes you comfortable in building your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) efficiently, since you do not have a lot of time for doing POCs. Make sure you complete proof of concept stage as quickly as possible to take the first-mover advantage in the industry. This can only happen if you work with the language in which you have hands-on experience. Maybe, at the later stage of development, you can try using languages built for specific requirements.

Authenticate & authorize

You need to make sure that your users are authenticated and authorized too. For this, you can try implementing authentication and authorization microservices provided by JSON Web Token (JWT), sessions token, or another provider. Depending on your specific requirements you can choose whichever provides the quick and easy implementation.

For instance, JSON Web Token provides an easy and comparatively fast implementation since it does not keep a token in your system. Rather it allows you to encode, encrypt, and directly send the token to the user. Also, make sure you always authorize your users. It is crucial to authorize terminal spots on your system. So that multiple users cannot make alterations in each other’s details.

Abstract base model

In software development, it is important to make sure that you don’t have to repeat processes for similar columns every time in your database. There are different sets in each table of your systems that require a similar process. Therefore, it’s only better to build an abstract base model for these columns. So that all the other model tables can inherit from abstract base models in your database.

Build notifications microservice

You know the importance of reminder notifications by your product to the users for engaging them. Your product also needs to remind users about the transactions too. Hence, it is important to build reminder microservices for your digital product. It is a different microservice than authentication. Therefore, make sure you build it separately. Try building notification reminders for your applications by outsourcing a third party microservice provider.

Use error logging tools

It is not possible to supervise internal server errors manually on a daily basis. Setting up a middleware will allow you to log errors on your production system. You will have to set up an error logging tool which will let you monitor your application log 24×7. This way you will be able to keep a track of all the errors that occur in your system. It helps you check the errors and work accordingly to remove them from your system by creating a webhook.

Throttling & rate limiting in APIs

To help you alleviate denial of service (DOS) attacks by black hat hackers, you need to set up rate limiting factors on your application servers. By building throttling in your APIs you can secure your application servers from distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. Since rate limiting can not fully shield you from such attacks. You need to introduce throttling in your APIs and protect your application servers.

Implement cron jobs

By implementing cron jobs in your application framework you can easily keep a track of your users purchase pattern and search history. With this you get access to the user’s purchase history. It helps you to easily make relevant recommendations about your recent or upcoming products to the customers on your system. Try not to put cron jobs in the crontab document of your system. Only your devOps team must have direct access to the cron jobs ensuring security of your application server.

Manage parameters file

For protecting your parameters file is it necessary to manage these secrets upfront. By adapting following methods you can organize and protect your parameter secretes:

1. You can set up a secret document and put it separately in an s3 bucket.
2. You can set up parameters in variable environments during deployment phase and then saving then back in s3
3. You can use any secrete management service for setting secretes in your application

API should be versioned

With the evolution of technology, business models also evolve simultaneously. So, you need to make sure your application’s frontend and backend are compatible with each other. For this, it is critical that you should version your API so that everything is streamlined and works seamlessly for everyone. It is your choice to either opt for different versions for different applications or you can go with the overall versioning of your application itself. But the point is never to miss this step altogether.

Application monitoring tool

Lastly, you need to make sure you are using an application monitoring system (APM) which helps you track your application’s performance, transactions, server connections, and the APIs. An APM tool will help you locate any issue in the crons jobs server and notify you immediately. Therefore helping you take appropriate action to resolve the problem in your system.

Wrap up

Creating a digital product from scratch may seem like a nightmare without having a complete understanding of what are the dos and don’ts of backend architecture. This guide can help you establish a systemic approach for backend software development by highlighting key components that you must have in your development framework.