Why software development need to consider all-on-cloud
For starters, “business as usual” is badly broken. In a traditional development organization, it’s often pretty tough to get things done, especially in a timely manner.
Standing up new environments involves, at a minimum, creating (at least) a conceptual architecture, a rough design, estimated use and peak loads, spacing the equipment needed to accommodate the system, acquiring it, and provisioning – finding room in one or more data centers; addressing power, communication, and floor space needs; and having the ops folks load the operating system and application, database, and other software…probably by hand. That takes a lot of time just to SAY…but to actually do; it can take weeks, or worse. And time is money.
In addition, managing tools and dependencies is difficult, to say the least. Even in the best of cases, tracking and managing server OS and software versions, not to mention the various patch levels and permissions from one server build to another, is a time-consuming exercise that drains away development (and ops) resources any time something that worked on one server yields different results on another. Having to manually manage the software stack is a time sink, and again, time is money.
Finally, uptime requirements for critical systems often require costly redundancies to meet: hot spares, clusters – all good things, but each comes with a price. If those things aren’t in place, outage costs can climb quickly; and if they are in place, the time and effort required to rebuild the failed system (to exactly match the live, now “production” environment) is still costly in terms of time and resources. Our customers are drowning in CAPITAL EXPENSES, buying hardware and software they hope they’ll never need in case they do. Meanwhile, budgets are shrinking.
Less money available after buying hardware and software (and data centers) means less your development team can do, less functionality you can provide…and more slowly. Meanwhile, the market keeps accelerating, and you’re missing critical opportunities.
