Why you should migrate to a cloud development environment

Look, I get it. The noise surrounding cloud development is deafening, and everyone is casually throwing around concepts that would need a complete revamping of the structure of the whole organization. So, let’s start from the beginning to fully explain why you should migrate to a cloud development environment.

What is a cloud development environment?

A development environment is a workspace where developers can make changes in the code without breaking anything in a live environment. A cloud development environment is exactly the same thing, but instead of being installed on a physical hard drive, it is located in the cloud and devs access it via a browser.

Why do you need one? Well, right now, the best (if not the only) way to develop the kind of apps the market is demanding (based on microservices, able to integrate the customer’s feedback quickly…) is using the cloud. And a cloud development environment is the perfect tool to start with it.

I can see that adopting new technology (like Kubernetes) and moving on from a local dev environment to a cloud one might seem risky and complicated, and one of the main concerns resides in the idea that Kubernetes and microservices can make a part of the development process easier but complicate the rest. I’m here to assure you that this is far from the case.

Why is cloud development better?

The development business is a fast-paced one. The standards imposed by the market are changing, and they are increasingly difficult to reach with local development. Some of the must-have features for a development environment are:

Management of complex architectures based on microservices.
Development and testing environments mirror production ones, so the process of updating the code is seamless.
Use of more complex software that needs more computing power than standard personal computers offer.

Access and management of containers and clusters, so the dev team can have all the available resources at their disposal.
If an app is intended to be run in a cloud environment, it is generally far more efficient to also develop and test it in the same cloud environment. There are other reasons why you might be interested in adopting this paradigm, like:

The dev team can work on the code from anywhere worldwide. This also implies that it’s easier to collaborate on projects and to share code between developers, fostering innovation and community spirit in the team.
The number of resources can be tailored for each specific project easily, optimizing their use.

The dev team can now focus on their code, not on managing infrastructure or identifying dependencies before merging or worrying about security issues. When the development environment is in the cloud, we can specify everything beforehand and provide it at the development stage, not only after the code is merged.

These are only a few reasons why you should seriously consider cloud development. We dive deeper into this topic in other articles, in case you want to learn more about the benefits of cloud-native development for your organization.

Some cloud computing use cases

Cloud development, and cloud computing in general, has been a crucial factor for the success of different technologies: new paradigms that are taking off with amazing possibilities, and also well-established industries that have upgraded to keep up with the times. Some of them are:

Big Data Analytics

The cloud is a very powerful tool for storing, managing, and analyzing this data. Its flexibility to manage computing resources (and dedicate extra resources to a project for a certain amount of time) makes it ideal to work with huge amounts of information.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

Marketing automation tools, customer relationship management (CRM)… SaaS technology is a way to store, organize and maintain the ever-growing company data efficiently, and the key to its success is that being hosted in the cloud, these tools can be accessed from anywhere, at any time.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

Companies are choosing to avoid infrastructure investments and hosting their data in service provider run data centers. This way, they can easily access their data via the cloud and focus on developing their product, instead of building and maintaining their own infrastructure.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

DR ensures your business can quickly recover and get back online in the event of a disaster. A standby site in the cloud allows you to recover from a disaster easily and with few consequences.

Backup as a Service (BaaS)

Restoring backups from the cloud is fast and can help companies avoid catastrophic data loss.

Current trends

By now, you should be almost completely convinced about jumping on the cloud development train. Maybe a sliver of doubt still haunts you: is it mature enough? You don’t want to be left behind, but early adopters find too many obstacles that you’re not ready to tackle. How is it really being used?

Here are some highlights from Flexera’s State of the Cloud Report 2022, including what they mean for your business and how to address any challenges they present.

63% of businesses are “heavy users,” currently running more than 25% of their workloads in the cloud. That’s up from 59% in 2021 and 53% in 2020.
Nearly all organizations have a multi-cloud strategy: 89% of organizations reported taking a multi-cloud approach, taking advantage of multiple cloud services from two or more providers.

More organizations are embracing hybrid cloud: 80% of businesses are taking a hybrid cloud approach, utilizing some combination of public and private clouds.
Public cloud usage is growing: organizations currently keep 48% of their data in the public cloud and are projected to add 7% over the next 12 months.

Security is the top cloud challenge: at 85%, security is the top cloud challenge facing organizations. And yet, more than 50% of respondents are open to moving some of their sensitive “consumer data” or “corporate finance data” to the cloud.
Cloud adoption is up and will continue to grow in the years to come, and you don’t want to miss out. Create a plan with your current and future business goals, and see where cloud development can help you achieve them.
This article was originally published at Napptive