Stability in No-Code

As you get to know no-code platforms, you'll start to build bigger projects. You might want to build a mobile application and launch it to thousands of your customers. You may look to build a free website that is driven by ads. Your application may just be a product that that allows users to buy items from you.

When building software, developers need to think about how systems might fail so that they can ensure the application continues to run as much as possible. There can be a very real cost when systems start to fail. An AWS outage can cost companies on the platform quite a bit of money.

Dig In

Creating on no-code platforms is no different. Whether you build a store front on Shopify or if you create an app on Bubble- what happens if the platform you chose has an outage, what would you do? What can you do? Outside of opening a support ticket there really isn't much. You're at the mercy of the platform. This should be something you're asking when you're evaluating these platforms.

You need to evaluate the risk of your application being down. Your customers depend on your product, and you can't be "in business" if your products are down or offline. Here are some things to consider.

Due Diligence

• Where will my apps be running? Sometimes the answer will be "we host these applications in AWS on redundant systems to ensure we have failover handled in the event of an outage" or it might be "we are hosting this on a single machine in my basement". You should always ask these questions and if it's not readily available, that should send up some red flags.
• How is data handled and separated? Your data is important. You need to know that your data isn't going to make it into someone else's application. Sometimes the platform you're using wont be storing your data in which case you don't need to worry about this. However, if it does, you need to know that your data is properly silo'd from their other customers. This is usually done in two ways, either they will give you your own identifier and all your data will be split out by that. Alternatively, they will create separate databases for your products. This isn't something that you should take lightly. Bubble apps, by default, allow anyone access to your data. This enables rich applications, but is probably something you need to take into account.
• How are backups done? How long are backups kept for? You need to know that there are copies of your data somewhere in the event that your applications fail.
• What is the process for failures? Servers and services fail. There are too many reasons why to list, but having predicability around these outages around communication and what it means to your business is huge so that you can set expectations for your customers.

What to Expect

You should expect that the platform you're using is stable. What this means is that, at a minimum:

• The infrastructure protects your customers
• Stored data is encrypted and backed up
• You have can reasonable expectations around uptime