Guest View: Being a good developer in the cloud era
By Imad Mouline
November 1, 2010 —
(Page 1 of 4)
In a cloud environment, the role of the developer means much more than simply creating and deploying applications. It is your job to develop and deliver high-performance cloud-based applications within the best cost structure for your organization.
Cloud computing environments provide new opportunities to optimize the performance of applications by using techniques that would have been unthinkable in traditional deployment models. But cloud environments can also make it easier to latch on to or develop bad habits such as throwing more hardware at a performance problem, since additional virtual servers are only a click (and a credit card charge) away.
The savvy developer will not only avoid such pitfalls, but will also be able to leverage the cloud provider's attributes to extract better performance at no additional cost. Achieving this level of optimization will require developers to extend beyond their traditional “comfort zones,” expand the scope of their roles and responsibilities, and become knowledgeable about the unique advantages and drawbacks of cloud computing environments.
As we can all see, Web applications are moving to the cloud at a stunning pace. According to Forrester, nearly 20% of all critical Web transactions in production contain at least one object—an ad, analytics tag, video or newsfeed, for example—from a cloud-based service.
The cloud is already having a major impact on Web application performance for many of the world’s leading companies, because the performance of cloud-based services varies widely based on service providers and regions.
From an IT operations perspective, the cloud presents several significant challenges that can impact application performance. First, the cloud is opaque, which means that cloud customers often have little to no visibility into system health outside of their own instance. Second, the cloud is a shared resource, and because virtualized applications can’t be 100% sealed off from one another, cloud customers can’t be sure that if a “neighbor” in the cloud experiences a spike in traffic, their own application performance levels won’t suffer as a result.
For years, as part of the testing and quality assurance process, developers have leveraged end-user performance testing and monitoring tools to gauge the end-user experience at the end of a complex Web application delivery chain, including third-party services, ISPs, carriers and browsers. With the advent of cloud computing, the cloud becomes another performance-impacting element in this chain.
Related Search Term(s): cloud
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