“Why the cloud matters to your development team”

I was reading an interview about cloud based platforms with Adrian Cockroft written by Stefan Tikov in September edition of IEEE Computing Edge. What really struck a chord was when Cockroft says “The biggest change is when someone working at a company thinks, I need some machines to do something”

The problem is that in companies with older operating models, to even get a single machine is a long and expensive process submitting tickets, arguing your case for the type and size of hardware with IT and procurement before finally some hardware arrives. In many larger companies the process takes months. Generally even then there is little control or access to configure things for optimum performance.

The situation is radically different in companies that use public or private clouds – where the main thing about cloud computing is that it is self-service. It gives developers and engineers the opportunity to try things out for real. It is possible to spin up different machines and multiple database servers even across geographic locations, in minutes, use them for some hours, tweak configurations to validate some ideas or architecture, rapidly expose new software to sets of users and then dispose of the cloud hardware.

The benefits for teams that use cloud technology are that they can validate a concepts, set up multiple test environments in days not months, validate new architectures, and can focus on engineering and not paperwork.

The impacts on the business are reduced timescales (accompanied by improved scalability and resilience), reduced risks and increased agility to meet the ever changing demands from their customers.

So for the sake of your developers, if not the bottom line - it is time to implement the cloud.

Tagged in:private cloudscloud computingagile application development