The cloud industry continues growing, with nearly $600 billion expected to be spent on cloud technology in the next year. Yet some companies avoid the cloud in favor of local computing resources. Switching to cloud-based development and acclimating to a new set of technology presents a learning curve — one that may be hard for your developers to get behind, but one that will make developing applications on the cloud relatively easy to accomplish.
What are the challenges first-time cloud users may face?
Empathy and understanding are huge parts of empowering any team in utilizing a new technology. It is important to put yourself in your developers’ shoes and understand what differences they will have to adapt to during a cloud migration so you can better set expectations for them and yourself appropriately.
Cloud-based technology has a different system for security, costs, and functionality. With every new way of navigating the cloud, however, your developers will benefit from advanced efficiency and ease of use. Many of the issues your developers have are going to have a solution, thanks to features such as military-grade encryption, a zero-trust architecture, PaaS, and containers. As an added benefit, the ROI on cloud computing was four times the ROI of on-premises deployments in 2020. This fact alone makes the switch worth it.
There will be pushback with any new technology, but here are four big benefits of utilizing the cloud that we are sure your developers will appreciate.
1. An application development platform in minutes
With cloud computing, your team can spend less time on plumbing and more time finding new ways of doing things. The cloud has many of the back-end development services offered as Platform as a Service (PaaS), which is rising in both popularity and reliability. In fact, Gartner estimates PaaS will account for $136 billion in spending in 2023. For those of you less familiar, Microsoft describes PaaS as follows:
“Platform as a service (PaaS) is a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud, with resources that enable you to deliver everything from simple cloud-based apps to sophisticated, cloud-enabled enterprise applications. You purchase the resources you need from a cloud service provider on a pay-as-you-go basis and access them over a secure Internet connection.”
2. Ease of experimentation through sandbox testing
All great developers are constantly seeking ways to learn and improve, and the power and ease of the cloud makes that possible. By quickly and easily providing an isolated area for experimentation and testing, the cloud enables developers to experiment, learn, perform R&D, and create proof of concepts. This can have positive benefits for your business, including increased morale which can lead to higher retention rates and improved customer satisfaction.
No longer are developers spending unnecessary time and effort using inefficient technology. With the right culture, time, and tools they can be empowered to unleash their creativity and encouraged to think outside the box
3. Automated insights for better decision-making
With powerful tools available within DevOps and the cloud, developers are empowered with immediate access to many powerful insights into their applications. If they deploy a new feature or bug fix, they have detailed and immediate information about how it’s operating. This can lead to product improvements, quick bug fixes, and a reduction in Mean Time to Recover.
4. Time savings through self-service templates
Utilizing the power of the cloud and automation can make creating new resources easy. When companies do this right, they can create a way for developers to select from a pre-approved list of resources that can be automatically built for them using configuration templates, corporate standards, and pre-applied policies. Using these self-service templates prevents unwanted resources or configurations from being created, removes roadblocks for testing, and increases developer velocity. Cloud application development and DevOps is a growing area of technology, and companies that implement cloud technology are experiencing higher ROIs than those without. The benefits of cloud vs on-premises can get muddled by the anxiety of letting go of something so familiar, but like any new technology, your dedication to understanding and communicating the benefits of the cloud to your DevOps team will pay off in the future