Author: Imran Shakil

History of MARS Missions

MARS the fourth planet of our solar system, named over Roman God of war. Also referred as Red Planet for its thin reddish atmosphere. Like Earth, Mars has seasons, polar ice caps, volcanoes, canyons, and weather. Mars is home of the tallest mountain in the solar system, Olympus Mons, a shield volcano, is 21km high and 600km in diameter. Mars has two moons Phobos and Deimos. 


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Mission MARS 2020

While the year 2020 passing tough time due to pandemic situation,  July 30th, 2020 – is the day appears with full of hope and excitement. This day NASA launches humanity’s most sophisticated rover for MARS, named Perseverance. Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launched Rocket ULA Atlas-V at 11:50 UTC

MISSION OBJECTIVE

Looking for Habitability
Identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.

Seeking Biosignatures
Seek signs of ancient life, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs of life over time.

Caching Samples
Gather rock and soil samples that could be returned to Earth by a future NASA mission.

Preparing for Humans
Demonstrate technology for future robotic and human exploration.

Perseverance

Perseverance rover, built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, is loaded with scientific instruments, advanced computational capabilities for landing and other new systems. Perseverance [persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success] the name given by 13 years old boy from Virginia, Alexander Mather. Unlike previous missions Perseverance will not use solar panel, instead will use 45KG Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (RTG) that converts the heat of radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity. Also there is a pair of lithium ion batteries to help handle peak demands or when rover uses more energy than RTG produces. Curiosity also uses RTG and able to survive from dust storm.

Perseverance

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Custom Database Connection on Magento 2

Sometimes Magento needs to connect with a different Database specially when we link Magento to a third party system (like ERP). Magento 2 is very much flexible and easily connect to other systems. To establish connection with a different database we need to apply following tweak.

All the credential for new connection can be set from the following file

app/etc/env.php

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Configure Fastly on Magento 2

The first impression of a website is its load time. To improve page load time CDN services plays an important role. People may know about CDN or not but every internet users interact with CDN now-a-days. CDN serves a large portion of the Internet content today, including web objects (text, graphics and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications (e-commerce, portals), live streaming media, on-demand streaming media, and social networks.

What is CDN

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. CDN is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers and their data centers. Which means CDN minimizes the distance between the visitor and the web server, so the download latency is reduced. Also it serves a cached version of contents to the users of different locations.
figure-1: CDN working principle

There are couple of CDN service providers MaxCDN, CloudFlare, Amazon CloudFront, Akamai etc. Recently one of the most popular CDN service is Fastly. Fastly, offers high speed as it employs SSD disks in their cache servers to fetch content. Also it provides Reverse Proxing, Load balancing, Header support, Origin shielding, Instant Purge support, HTTP request fulfillment and more.

Magento & Fastly

Magento is one of the best e-commerce platforms with the striking features like scalability, flexibility, robustness, customization and user-friendliness along with these using CDN service Fastly will drive your store into next level of business. Therefore, it becomes essential for store owners to look for the ways to enhance the speed and performance of the website. I have divided the whole process into two sections Firstly-side configuration and Magento-side configuration.

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