Application Development in the Cloud: Going Beyond Infrastructure as a Service
The cloud is changing the expectations of both those who use it to run businesses and those who use it as a development platform. We mentioned several times that software developers love the freedom that a cloud environment gives them because they can simulate any configuration of hardware/software that they want to test their applications on. However this capability, part of the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, seems to have hit a limit as far as developers are concerned.
So long as a developer is building something that can be defined within the IaaS parameters, everything goes well. But when the developer wants to use lower level functions, he or she hits a road block. The high productivity environment that IaaS provides now becomes a constraint because in the interests of stability, it lays a lot of constraints on what can be done and what cannot be done.
Assembling software?
Many major cloud platforms have realized this and have begun to offer more fundamental services that work at a very low level as well as the common services that developers are used to. As a result, major enterprise level applications are becoming a composite collection of user developed code, low level functions provided by cloud service providers and functionality developed by independent software vendors. The developer is now writing very specialized bits of code that really forms the core of his applications, and for other part of the functionality he/she is more involved in assembling applications.
Internal IT faces a challenge
Due to this approach, which is going way beyond IaaS, internal IT departments will face considerable competition from external cloud service providers. They need to find ways to work collaboratively with cloud service providers so that they can provide those bits of domain expertise that a cloud service provider cannot. Internal IT can help by studying cloud service providers and their capabilities so that developers have ready access to the services they need.
Creation of a service catalog is extremely important. Based on the results of an in-depth study of cloud service providers, internal IT can create an approved service catalog. This will ensure that developers use standardized cloud services for most of their developmental needs. The organization gains by having a degree of standardization for most parts of the application while giving the developer the freedom to write code for the critical parts that are not available as a service from a cloud vendor.
Costs
All of the above brings down the cost of application development while increasing the developer’s capabilities. However, the use of cloud based components will mean that there will be recurring (but relatively small) costs of using the application throughout its lifetime. It is important that this is made clear – both to management and to users so that there is transparency all through.
A very major benefit of this approach – in addition to the speed of development and low initial costs – is the inherent capability of cloud based services to scale up and down. This is something that in-house IT teams just cannot achieve. Your solution is built to be scalable even before the first line of code is written. To explain this better,GMO Cloud illustrates a high availability system in its suggested configurations. Find out how scalability is at play in this type of set-up.
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About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
