Top Tips to Make Cloud Application Development Lot More Simpler

As per the reports the global public cloud market has grown 25% and topped more than $190 billion in 2018 from just $87 billion in 2015. This trend tells us that the cloud based applications are on top of the trend right now and developers need to keep up with the technological advances taking place in the cloud architecture. Cloud programming tools are different from traditional systems as performance can slow in some ways and integration work can be complex. Hence to remove these issues, enterprises should develop new best practices in this regard. 

More and more companies are now embracing cloud application development and cloud computing. As per a report, 76% of businesses have already moved part of their data center infrastructure to the cloud and more are on the way. Let’s now discuss about some of the tips to help make cloud application development simpler: –

Traditional development was more under the programming environments like Microsoft’s .NET or Oracle’s Java Platforms. Although these options are good for enhancing existing infrastructure but cloud means working with different platforms. Therefore, developers should become familiar with new platforms such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Microsoft’s Azure and Salesforce’s Force.com. The developers may also need to work with open cloud solutions like Apache’s CloudStack and OpenStack. Therefore, the developers may need to go for specialized training to work on these platforms. For example, the AWS Certified Solutions Architect program covers the movement of data in and out of AWS, architectural best practices and AWS costs.

Performance issues can really derail system development and cloud itself presents new challenges. Data may have to travel long distances from one country to another. When this information moves, it can face network bottlenecks, latency and constrained networks. Therefore, applications have to be architected and built in such a way that sufficient wide area network resources are available along each step of the travel. Bottlenecks can also happen in the data center because cloud, especially public, often means denser systems. Traditionally, applications ran on few computers hence performance bottlenecks were easy to identify and contain. Cloud service may run on multiple servers in some extremely large data centers. Hence developers must be aware of these issues and should design accordingly as information flows among web servers, database servers and application servers. Their application design must account for potential server load or bandwidth issues to make sure that the systems meet desired objectives.

Nowadays, businesses interact more closely with many partners and customers and their applications connects with outsiders’ systems also. Cloud enables businesses to extend their systems and share data and processes but developers must be ready to handle the security issues while opening up these systems to others. The developers who have only focused on their own system have to learn about these things as these issues are becoming common. Developers need to extend their focus beyond their own applications and should examine and check all connected components.

Integration is another thing to tackle and cloud increases integration complexity. Companies generally underestimate the integration challenges and their potential impact. Today, applications can consist of thousands of small modules that interact with one another. Tracking the connections and just finding out what is connected to what is not that easy. Sometimes a business may also need to peek into the connections and make sure that the various elements are working perfectly. But the thing is that, they may have limited visibility into all the connections. Hence they should learn how to tackle these integration challenges.

Another issue is the high potential to unknowingly waste money on cloud service fees. Application development is generally dynamic and system configurations are changing continuously. A virtual machine may be allocated for a test one day and it can still be running many days later. With traditional systems, such things are not major things as you only have to pay the electricity bill to run that server which is not much. But on cloud services, with usage based metering on leased virtual machine resource, the bill rises with every moment that resource runs hence you need to think about this and handle this carefully.

There is no doubt that cloud computing offers so many benefits to the businesses like more flexibility, more agility and lower costs. But in order to make sure that the development is highly efficient, businesses should understand the fundamental differences between the traditional development and cloud based development and therefore should take necessary steps to remove these potential risks to achieve higher efficiency, higher security, higher performance, more features at a lesser cost.