Developers of the day have it better than any of their predecessors. The current world is obsessed with technology and most of this technology has software at its heart. Businesses now want greater functioning software with all the right features, so they are not sparing any efforts in to offering developers with the kind of resources they can utilize to get the job done.
However, this opportunity has come with its own unique set of difficulties. Now developers need to build software that doesn’t have any sort of bugs, is top notch in terms of its security endpoints and is flexible enough to accommodate any changes or required updates in run time. Add to this the increasing pressure on developers to reduce the timelines required from getting a software from development to its market ready state, and one can understand how important it is for them to know the best resources available to them for meeting all such requirements.
And where can they find a resource which allows them to meet all of these extremely stringent requirements? It’s easy, in the cloud!
If you are a developer in today’s world, you should know that modern day cloud platforms like AWS and Microsoft Azure offer everything you need. Here is a list of these advantages that cloud offers to modern day development teams:
The Ability To Scale:
Perhaps the biggest advantage that a developer can leverage from the cloud is scalability. In previous times, a major part of a developer’s job was to appropriate the kind of underlying resources of hardware that each node of it’s software required for functionality. On top of this, if the application they were developing was more complex and required a high amount of availability, they would need to delve into provisioning and setting up things like storage area configurations. This made the job really difficult as this was highly time consuming and embedded rigidity in to the system, which are two big problems that no developer should ever have to deal with.
But as of now, a developer can simply scale as per requirements through the cloud. So whether the requirement is to add more servers or replace the existing one with a more powerful one, all they need to is the induce scaling and the job will be done in a very short span of time.
They can also induce auto scaling so that the cloud itself manages the resources required based on predefined policy metrics.
Cloud Computing Advantages for Development Teams
Reduced Resource Provisioning Times:
Developing an app or a software is a very complex undertaking and most don’t know that testing is a major part of this. A software is needed to be tested in multiple different test environments of various configurations before it can be considered market ready, but in old times, such a requirement would take weeks if not months to get requisitioned, sanctioned and fulfilled for the development team to utilize it.
In the cloud, this can be done almost instantaneously. So whether a developer wants some new VMS or a different type of a database, it can easily acquire by tweaking the environment configurations on its own.
Add to this the high amount of services and technologies being made available to developers by cloud providers each day and developers have a platform where they can not just provision resources easily but also alter the scope of the tests without much difficulty leading to better, more agile applications being built.
Utilizing PaaS And IaaS For Powering Faster Deployment and Delivery Cycles:
For developers, flexibility is highly important but when this flexibility gets combined with readymade resources, the scenario becomes even better.
In the cloud, developers don’t have to start from scratch. They can utilize the Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service resources to acquire most of the required environment resources, thus allowing them to build and deploy applications at a much faster rate.
In IaaS, just as the term implies, you can acquire infrastructure for your requirements as per the project’s needs. This includes all elements of physical infrastructure that are require to get an app developed like VMs and storage specs, but the difference is that you get them in a virtualized form over the internet. There is no difference in functionality however.
Once you get them, you will then be required to set up your software and OS on it.
In PaaS, the OS, software is offered in addition to the physical resources, making the job for developers even easier, as through this, they can jump straight into the development phase and just add or reduce resources as needed.
Leveraging Proximity Based Experience Optimization:
Developers know how crucial a factor optimizing user experience is to the overall success of their app or software and one of the most important factors on which this success is dependent is the proximity of the software hosting site to the user.
Previously, it was next to impossible to offer users, based in different locations around the globe, the same level of experience, but the cloud makes this possible.
A software can now be replicated to multiple different hosting sites spread around the globe in terms of it’s replication of master data. This results in incredibly improved end user experience.
On top of this, cloud providers like Azure offer developers to leverage Content Delivery networks for furnishing the same aim i.e. improved user experience, with the only difference here being that in CDNs, the app isn’t required to be hosted in multiple different locations as the CDN augments this needs through its own well spread network of servers. These servers then make web requests for content respond at a quicker rate, thereby making it easy for users to access a wide variety of content rich files including those of video, images etc.
Wrapping Things Up:
The advantages of cloud for developers don’t end here as there are multiple other equally powerful resources that developers can leverage like deployment slots and the ability to run resources in “Serverless” environments if you are a service like Azure functions.
To best understand how to fully utilize the cloud to make the task of development better, one is highly recommended to undergo cloud computing bootcamp training through the provider’s own certification path and gain incredibly valuable insights and hands on knowledge on the multiple development specific resources.