Codeless Guide

Unqork Blueprint: Power of Codeless Development

Unqork’s codeless development platform combines the power of visual programming with enterprise-grade security and compliance.


Introduction

Unqork is the world’s first codeless enterprise application platform. It was designed from the ground up to support every stage of the development lifecycle from designing & building applications to ongoing maintenance, IT governance, and infrastructure management.

At the core of the platform is Unqork’s revolutionary codeless engine, which completely separates application logic & behavior from the codebase underneath, and therefore eliminates the inevitable challenges of maintaining years—if not decades—of legacy code. By combining the codeless engine with a fully-managed cloud infrastructure, Unqork empowers organizations to deliver robust, dependable, and secure enterprise services to their end-users. 

Key benefits
  • Single-tenant: All Unqork instances are single-tenant by default. Only your products, rules, and customers live inside of your instance. Every Unqork customer receives non-production environments in a VPC separate from the production environment.

  • Cloud-native: Run your application on Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure’s highly secure infrastructure platforms.

  • Flexible deployments: Unqork is a cloud-native, highly elastic architecture running Kubernetes and MongoDB Atlas under the hood, enabling high scalability, upgrades, and patches with zero downtime. And Unqork's modern architecture data layer can be scaled, resulting in excellent performance and security that is second to none.

This guide will explore the platform components that users can leverage to manage & scale their application architectures and deliver future-proof software to their users.


Key capabilities and components

Flexible and dynamic data schema

Flexible storage
Configurations created and stored as JSON allow for flexible and dynamic data schema to store multiple data types and formats.
Relational database
Support full ACID transactions, support for joins in queries, an ability to have two types of relationships instead of one: reference and embedded.
Rich query APIs 
Rich query APIs allow filtering and sorting by any field, no matter how nested it may be within a document. 

Containerized servers

Screen Shot 2021-10-01 at 4.38.59 PMEvent-driven architecture
Unqork uses events, such as a change in state, to trigger and communicate between decoupled services allowing those services to be scaled, updated, and deployed independently.
High performance and scalability
Unqork is containerized and managed in a Kubernetes cluster, allowing flexible deployments that can scale up and out. Node.js’ “Single Threaded Event Loop” combined with node-cluster supports many concurrent client requests.
Server-side execution
The same configured business rules and workflow can be executed either client-side or server-side depending on security and performance needs.

CX and API renderer

UI rendering and custom styling
Automatically generate a fully responsive UI using your branding and your styles. Renderer interprets a configuration JSON on the fly, so no code is generated, and upgrading the renderer to the latest frameworks is a seamless exercise.
Seamless handoffs
Start on one device or with one user, finish with another, or collaborate on the same page.
Validation on the glass
Move business rules to the glass, and stop any errors from going through.
 
foxo_logo_orange_white
"A huge part of everything we built was Unqork. It’s really what has allowed us to scale"
—Tyler Danielson, CTO, FOXO

 

Designer

Intuitive self-service builder
Drag-and-drop intelligent components that automatically validate and monitor other components to build complex interactions.
Codeless, not low-code/no-code
Unlike a low-code platform, no scripting is necessary with Unqork. If you need to perform a custom computation, you can do it in Excel-like formula or a visual ETL data transformer. Thus, bucketing a codeless solution as low-code/no-code is not accurate.
Industry templates
Leverage an extensive library of snippets and customize them to adhere to your specific business needs and requirements.
Specialized components
Use tailor-made components to address enterprise pain points, including e-Signatures, PDF generation, dashboard, spreadsheet & document uploads, to name a few.

Security & compliance

Screen Shot 2021-10-01 at 4.39.44 PMSOC 2 Type II Certified
Unqork undergoes annual SOC 2 Type II examinations to attest to those security requirements. This examination is conducted in accordance with AICPA standards, specifically AT-C Section 205. On an annual basis, an external auditor evaluates the design of Unqork’s security controls to ensure suitable security assurance. Additionally, Unqork’s controls are routinely tested to verify control effectiveness.
    • To learn more about our compliance functionality in a variety of areas, visit our security guide.
ISO 27001
Unqork is ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified. ISO 27001 is an internationally recognized standard defining security and privacy best practices for information security management. This certification demonstrates our commitment to preserving the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information within our security-first SaaS.
Penetration and static code testing
Unqork regularly assesses its platform security with pentesting bi-annually (at least), including periodic independent network and application pentesting, in-house manual application review and testing, and client-driven application penetration tests. In addition, Unqork routinely coordinates with customers who perform their own independent penetration tests on their dedicated instances.
User authentication
We integrate with your SSO (OIDC, SAML 2.0, or custom). We also offer two-factor token-based authentication for new users.

APIs & integrations

Unqork allows Creators to automatically generate APIs using the same tools to develop the customer experience and call that module headless through an API.

Screen Shot 2021-10-01 at 4.41.57 PMOne of the great benefits of Unqork is how it empowers organizations to seamlessly integrate custom applications with existing legacy systems and external third-party solutions. Whether it be an API, a custom integration, or a blue-chip technology partner, the Unqork platform allows users to authenticate these services through many methods while providing the means to apply mTLS or other controls to further enhance integration security.

 

Unqork ExpressCloud maximizes performance & security to allow for reliability and continuous delivery. See how ExpressCloud automatically optimizes your environment's runtime so you can scale.

 

High availability & redundancy 

When it comes to SaaS, reliability is a cornerstone. In relinquishing control of your software’s backend infrastructure operations, you need a partner that you can trust to ensure the consistent availability and performance of your business-critical applications. 

Unqork provides you with the reliability and availability to give you confidence that your employees and/or customers have access to your Unqork services, when they need it, and from where they need it.

Our always-on monitoring processes and technologies give you peace of mind knowing that your services are constantly supervised and optimized. 

We’re committed to ensuring that your business-critical software is continuously up and running. A 2020 analysis found 99.99% platform uptime availability.

We deploy our SaaS solutions in a load-balanced and highly available infrastructure that’s designed to handle heavy traffic and eliminate single points of failure at any level of the deployment architecture. 

Failure detection capabilities exist within each tier, and once activated, send instant alerts to the Network & Security teams for correction. Additionally, failures are automatically contained, as redundant data backups allow single instances to fail without any impact on the service or user experience. 

Automatic data & configuration backup 

Periodic data backups are performed automatically and allow for one or more data recovery points, giving you the confidence that your data won’t be lost. 

SaaS solutions from Unqork come equipped with built-in data resilience, achieved by automated, scheduled backups of data and configurations that create multiple service recovery points. These are essential to business continuity and disaster recovery plans and, upon a customers’ request, can also be utilized to restore service to a previous state. 

Backup & restoration 

Data backups are separately managed for each of our customers in order to meet the client’s policies and requirements. The following are some examples of backup and restoration procedures inherent in our SaaS offering: 

    • Recurring backups: All data is routinely backed up and safely stored daily, and transactional data is backed up every six hours. 

    • Retention period: For most SaaS clients, data backup points are stored for a defined retention period of one calendar year. 

    • Storage policies: In case of disaster, additional backup snapshots are stored for use if a recovery effort is required. 

Business continuity and disaster recovery

Unqork’s SaaS operations team manages the services necessary to restore your data as soon as possible following a disaster-type event. Our teams conduct annual business continuity and disaster recovery tests to exercise recovery capabilities, update playbooks, and ensure responders are trained and equipped for rapid response. Unqork’s business continuity and disaster recovery program ensures optimal execution in restoring service should a natural or artificial disaster compromise your primary processing location.

      • Read more about the Unqork platform’s high availability and redundancy here.

Multi-region highly available environments

To deliver next-level reliability and improve overall customer performance, Unqork has introduced Multi-Region Highly Available Environments. Previously, customer environments were available across multiple zones in a single region. Now, customers have access to environments that span multiple regions and multiple zones. This provides additional redundancy for local failures and regional service procedure outages. Unqork routes creators and end-users depending on latency to the best region, allowing them to optimize performance and improve resiliency.

The new multi-region configurations are supported in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific. Benefits: 

    • Improved availability & SLAs: Uptime is critical for any application and business, and a multi-region solution allows you to deliver better availability SLAs and improve platform uptime availability even further.
    • Lower recovery times: Our rigorous security measures start with availability of the Unqork platform, and applications built on it, across multiple regions to satisfy enterprise business continuity.
    • Improved performance through the use of optimization: Geotargeting ensures that creators and end-users can be routed to the best cluster in case of a disaster. 

 

Conclusion

The pressures on organizations to “go digital” have never been more significant. The Unqork platform takes on much of the “heavy lifting” of development, so companies can focus entirely on building value-generating applications. 

Unqork’s unified platform comes with all the tools needed to create custom, enterprise-grade solutions which can be seamlessly integrated with legacy systems and third-party services. Most importantly, our platform delivers peace of mind. We make it easy to operate and scale complex enterprise applications and provide benefits to your customers, your workers, and your organization as a whole.

Want to learn more about how Unqork can be used at your organization? Schedule a demo with one of our codeless experts today.

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