Experiments in the cloud are paying off
By Jennifer deJong
November 15, 2010 —
(Page 1 of 3)
The term has taken on so many meanings, it’s more of a high-minded technology concept than anything else. But “cloud computing” is beginning to impact development teams in some down-to-earth ways. Three key things are happening:
First, teams are turning to cloud services like Amazon EC2, among others, to test new applications quickly and cheaply, thereby circumventing IT, said Forrester Research senior analyst Mike Gualtieri.
Second, developers are writing various types of mini apps designed to run on cloud-based instances instead of on-premise servers. “They are dabbling with non-critical applications outside their enterprise, and there is a whole lot of experimentation going on,” said Jay Jarrell, president and CEO of Objectivity, which makes software for data management.
Third, as developers experiment with the cloud, they are beginning to tap into the growing array of APIs and services cloud providers offer. There are tools for storage, message queues, payment services, Web fulfillment, load balancing, and more, said Mike Rozlog, product manager of Delphi solutions for development toolmaker Embarcadero. “The cloud is enticing for developers; there’s a whole productivity aspect to it."
Here’s a look at some of the ways in which development teams are interacting with the cloud today.
Cloud testing
Chief among the benefits of cloud computing for development teams is fast, inexpensive access to server resources for testing, said Gualtieri. Instead of relying on IT operations to set up on-premise test environments, teams rent virtual servers from a cloud computing service provider, paying pennies per hour per server instance.
This approach saves money and time and is more flexible than traditional test setups, he said. “Developers can make an end run around IT, which has traditionally maintained tight control over servers.” And because cloud-based testing projects run for a limited time period, serious cost savings can be realized.
“In big companies, chargeback [for a server-based test environment] can run as much as US$10,000 a month. It’s insane,” Gualtieri said. What’s more, cloud-based testing makes it easy to configure (and reconfigure) the environment any way you want during the test process. “You specify different operating systems and different databases,” he said.
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