Global spending on information technology services will be over $1.25 trillion this year and an estimated $1.4 trillion next year. Cloud computing is a major part of IT development, accounting for nearly $500 billion in spending in 2022 and poised to outgrow other sectors in the near future. These numbers go to show that businesses around the world are seeing the value and ROI of cloud computing.
The cloud is not just for storage and virtual machines either — individual apps, workflows, and entire business infrastructures can be run in the cloud. Think of companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Adobe. These businesses have entire models that rely on the cloud to provide their services.
And you might be wondering: “Why? What is so great about cloud-based technology?” Great question.
The Benefits of Cloud vs. On-Premises
Many businesses are resistant to change, and this resistance is no different when adopting new technology. Although the cloud is not perfect and does take some time to get used to, there are four benefits that, in our opinion, far outweigh the cons.
1. Cloud-based services enable easy-to-use resources.
In the cloud, you gain the ease of creating resources and, in some cases, entire environments for research, proof of concepts, troubleshooting, or live production. It increases your overall velocity, enabling a wide variety of applications to be created faster using the suite of tools available with many cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure.
2. Increase the speed of development through PaaS.
A great tool to leverage in your modern applications in the cloud is platform as a service, an infrastructure that offers backend development services. Leveraging PaaS makes it easier to support operations and enables a faster speed of development, which will relieve some of the burdens from your development team. With PaaS, you can purchase the services you need from a cloud service provider, such as messaging infrastructure, service bus, databases, machine learning, search, etc.
3. The cloud provides additional security.
Traditional businesses used to prefer housing everything on-site. This was how companies, governments, and other organizations believed they could best protect their proprietary data and business processes. Security and data protection is a valid concern, especially today with government organizations creating and enforcing tighter regulations on security — and for good reason. By utilizing cloud-based technology, your cloud provider has services that can take care of security behind the scenes. It is in your vendor’s best interest to maintain strict security controls and provide levels of compliance certification by default. Cloud vendors help companies protect their information by providing multiple ways of enforcing policies and restrictions with leading encryption, threat detection, and a zero-trust architecture.
4. The functionality of cloud technology increases efficiency.
Not only does the cloud allow you to run applications regardless of operating system and configuration, but cloud-based technology helps provide deep insights while monitoring all resources and applications in real time. This involves performance metrics, logs, and telemetry, giving you immediate feedback on any problems that arise, including the effects of changes to your code. Spending less time on all these administrative tasks means spending more time on solving problems and adding value to your business, which is never a bad thing!
Now that you know some of the many benefits of the modern application, here are seven features that make those benefits possible:
• Loosely coupled architecture
A good modern application has loosely coupled components for maximum flexibility.
A loosely coupled architecture helps reduce interdependencies across components and modules. It can especially help to reduce the risk that one change within a module will create unanticipated effects within another module. It also increases developers’ ability to add modules and replace modules, better enabling you to deploy smaller pieces more quickly and easily.
• Scalability
Because modern applications are loosely coupled, they are more flexible in their scalability than their legacy counterparts. This flexibility can allow you to scale each individual component separately from every other component. This can be vital for applications where individual components have different load patterns and you only want to scale certain components. This is especially true when leveraging serverless architectures like Azure Functions or AWS Lamda or leveraging container services like AKS in Azure or EKS in AWS.
• Feature flags
The modern application takes advantage of feature flags. These more easily validate feature functionality (and with minimal disruption). Teams can perform “soft rollouts” of new code, features, and functionalities, and the system will provide a safety net. They can then use that information to determine when to activate a feature and quickly validate any problems or risks identified. Sometimes development teams use conditional feature flags to perform “canary” releases that turn a feature flag on for a subset of customers. This enables limited testing and monitoring prior to activating the feature for everyone. This is also a tremendous benefit for your DevOps teams as they look to streamline deployments and minimize or eliminate disruptions.
• Store secrets
There are a lot of aspects to think about and plan for when building out a modern application. This is true no matter your role. One of the primary tasks is making your application as secure as possible. One of the ways you do that is to treat sensitive information appropriately. Applications typically will need access to different types of configuration data. This data can be in the form of just basic settings, or it can be sensitive in nature and better help that application connect to other resources in your environment — things such as:
- Encryption keys.
- Usernames.
- Passwords.
- Connection strings.
- API keys.
These types of configurations are typically referred to as secrets. It is a best practice to manage and access this sensitive information correctly and in the most secure way
possible. Typically, there is a service or application dedicated to this type of task. Common system integrations that do this are Key Management Service (AWS) and Azure Key Vault.
• Externalized application configurations
Reducing the burden on both ops and DevOps is the ultimate goal of most organizations so that they’re happier, more efficient, and able to do their work quickly. The modern app with cloud-based technology lets you externalize application configurations and store them in the environment as lookups rather than within the application itself or its server. This type of setup allows for easier change control, updates, and audibility (not to mention troubleshooting).
• Telemetry and instrumentation
Modern applications require telemetry and instrumentation, allowing you to fully track the performance and health of your application. This increases your level of insight into how your environment is functioning and provides insight into historical data and trends. Many tools that allow you to see the overall security of your environment and application are available as well. Having this level of information in an intuitive visual interface makes it easier to be proactive in monitoring, supporting, and protecting your company’s critical infrastructure and data. This also provides real-time feedback that could be crucial for your company to stay ahead of the curve.
• Containerization or serverless technology
Modern applications should take advantage of containerization or serverless technology. With containers, your application can reliably move from one location or computing environment to another without bumping into compatibility issues. This can be a huge part of building a successful cloud-based app. Alternatively, services like Azure Functions and AWS Lambda offer a serverless architecture that can easily adapt to modern business needs. With serverless architecture, you can run applications without the hassle of managing infrastructure — the cloud does this for you!
Because containerization is one of the most significant trends right now, let’s dive into containerization in more detail.
What Is App Containerization?
Containerization allows you to run an application in a container in one environment and transfer your application with all its elements to another environment with ease. From testing through staging and production, containerization streamlines cloud DevOps best practices by grouping components like libraries and frameworks into a simple package that can be easily deployed.
IT is responsible for a much more comprehensive range of environments, configurations, and security concerns. Containers make deployments safer and more efficient, and they even make rollbacks easy if something goes wrong. Containerization gives developers and DevOps teams time back to take care of other things.
Building in the Cloud
Now that we have talked about the benefits of cloud vs. on-premises and the ideal features of a modern cloud application, we should talk about how the cloud should be leveraged. When building new applications, you might want to do the following:
1. Think cloud-first.
New development should have a cloud-first mentality. This means once you accept the cloud and start utilizing it, everything moving forward should be built with its benefits in mind. This will future-proof your technology and help you avoid having to do this migration again in the future when technology is more advanced.
2. Create a component library.
Organizations with a list of reusable common components and services save time and money and make fewer mistakes in the long run. Each common component or service publishes its endpoints and requirements so any other application can leverage the resources as intended through a shared service instead of needing to pull the code directly into the application itself.
3. Ensure developer self-service.
Finally, ensure the development team has the right information and resources to maintain full velocity from the initial story to code completion and into production. Your DevOps should be agile and able to innovate without being limited by resource availability. Cloud computing opens new possibilities that help them become more autonomous in acting on behalf of the company, and that will ultimately keep your entire organization agile.
The Importance of the Cloud
Most importantly, the cloud is an investment, and building applications on the cloud takes time, money, and other resources. Any time developers focus on these modernization efforts is time taken away from building new features. But those resources are well spent if they make it easier to support a secure and resilient work environment.
That’s what the cloud is designed to do, and that’s why so many businesses are spending so heavily on it. Cloud computing helps small businesses leverage the same power that major enterprises do within the cloud and do so on an as-needed basis to scale their companies. Corporations use it to streamline their processes and ensure everything from operations to the customer experience is consistent across all channels anywhere in the world.