Cloud invites new answers to age-old app development concerns

During the past several years, cloud computing services have been gaining momentum as decision-makers throughout the business world have recognized that the technology can reduce costs and improve agility. More recently, however, executives have also begun to notice how the cloud can improve application development efficiency without impairing the quality of the end result.

A CIO report recently highlighted the potential the cloud holds for app development, noting that using hosted services enables a much more frictionless experience than conventional practices, which were often plagued by challenges with poor configuration and collaboration. Organizations can now obtain the resources they need to create sophisticated applications in a matter of minutes, compared to the weeks it used to take when using conventional infrastructure services.

Meanwhile, the sophisticated nature of today's software means that various levels of complex information must be properly integrated in order for the application to function smoothly across all platforms, including traditional desktop and mobile environments. Because a cloud computing infrastructure can remove the friction associated with building applications within traditional architectures, companies are focusing on speeding up the overall software life cycle. CIO noted that this is where DevOps comes into play.

Engineering new application production
The DevOps movement is receiving widespread attention throughout the business world for its ability to improve collaboration and augment the application development process. However, CIO stated that the benefits of simply combining operations and development teams are often exaggerated, as inefficiencies associated with conventional practices exist within the procedure itself, not necessarily the people.

In many cases, cloud computing technologies, Platform as a Service offerings in particular, can provide organizations with the agility they need to optimize software development. In fact, a separate IDC report forecast the PaaS market to generate more than $14 billion in revenue by 2017. This rapid growth is largely driven by the business world's ongoing need to modernize software creation, deployment and management.

Analysts also highlighted how PaaS's ability to improve information management throughout the application development life cycle is one of the key contributing factors to the market's new allure.

As business software becomes more complicated not only to develop but also to deploy and manage, companies are looking to the cloud to improve agility without compromising quality. If decision-makers properly map out their use of cloud computing services, they will likely encounter opportunities to optimize performance and create competitive advantages.

Continue reading...