Influence of Cloud Computing on Software Development and Delivery

Today cloud application development is key for organisations to quickly bring differentiating services for customers, rapidly cutting down planning, development and roll out. With exponential growth of smartphone based applications, there is an increasing pressure on companies for value added cloud based services. As per Gartner market forecast, the worldwide revenue of public cloud services increased by 19% to reach $ 246.8 billion in 2017, while total revenue is projected to hit $411.4 billion by 2020.

Currently Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud lead the race with other players as in the foray. AWS is a leading cloud provider with over 1,000,000+ active user, its quarterly revenue has grew at 26% to reach $6.7 billion in Q3,2018. Microsoft is also catching up with impressive 76% year-on-year growth.

Leaving aside, all the statistics, in today’s world of enterprise IT, there are multiple factors company must consider in order to decide whether a cloud infrastructure is the right choice.

Cloud based development and deployment looks attractive for startups, small, medium to big business as well. Some of the key considerations are listed below(may not be exhaustive)

1. Year-on-Year cost to business for on premise vs elastic cloud infrastructure with pay-as-you-go model

2. Frequency of changes to existing applications, cycle time and lead times for external partners/vendors for on-premise development & infrastructure

3. Strategy to migrate cloud applications – Lift & Shift vs re architecting for the cloud to utilise horizontal scaling, micro services, container based serverless architecture

4. Data security and integrity is one of the key concerns for companies

5. Use of propitiatory or highly customised enterprise applications requiring involvement of additional services, cloud vendor tools to migrate and maintain

6. Agile development methodologies, providing Analytics and Big Data capabilities, DevOps Integration, reskilling and changing the mindset of developers for cloud based development

7. Deployment, debugging for cloud based applications is different from traditional on-premises installations

8. Time to settle for the company during the changeover and managed services

9. Adherence to legal requirements, audits, industry and regulatory compliance

Strategy can vary from core and data sensitive applications remaining on-premise, while less critical functions adopting a hybrid model of on-premise and cloud. This would help companies to gauge pros and cons of both the worlds.

While new smart applications can be deployed on cloud to help companies to steer ahead of competitors, in terms of time-to-market with cutting edge solutions and applications services. Advantage being having application and process in near real-time within an elastic and efficient environment. Expanding new services incorporating Internet-of-Things, container based deployments hold key as well.