What developers need to know about the cloud
August 15, 2010 —
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Cloud computing has come front and center as a preferred option for
application deployment. Yet a big question that has lingered is what it
all means for developers? Should they care about the cloud? Isn’t it
simply another deployment option, like servers or mobile devices?
A closer look reveals that cloud application development is a two-sided
coin. There’s developing applications for the cloud, and
developing applications in the cloud, and each requires
developers to consider factors they wouldn’t normally think about when
writing code to be downloaded onto on-premises servers or via disk.
Colleen Smith, vice president of software-as-a-service for development
tool company Progress Software, said there are a number of keys to
consider when writing applications to be run on on-premise servers.
One important factor is in the area of the user interface. Developers
writing applications to be used in the cloud must think about where
people are accessing the application from (mobile device, iPad,
desktop?), and if they will be connected and then disconnected. Further,
developers must consider that different types of users will now have
access to the application—potentially, anyone on a company’s supply
chain, including buyers, suppliers, customers and more.
“UI flexibility is an important consideration,” Smith said, as different
people will expect the application to work in different ways.
A second factor for developers to think about is multitenancy. “As a
service provider, you want to try to lower the cost of managing and
maintaining the application. You need to build into the application the
concept of supporting multiple customers with a single instance of the
application. This needs to be planned in the application architecture
and developed into the app,” Smith said.
Then there are issues of integration and workflow, and of security. With
on-premise software, you know any other applications that need to be
integrated are there and stable, and as long as you have the APIs, you
know you can integrate. But in the cloud, other applications might be on
a different server, or in another cloud. Smith pointed out that after
you use an image from the Amazon cloud and put it down, it will have a
different IP address when you go to bring it up again. She said
developers must take situations like that into consideration when
coding, and that it’s imperative to build business process flows into
the application’s business logic.
As for security, Smith said, the data’s sitting up there in the cloud,
and developers must consider who will have access to the data. For
on-premise applications, developers can leave encryption and permissions
up to the IT staff. But Amazon won’t do that for your hosted app, she
said, so, if you’re storing credit card information and have to follow
PCI compliance, it’s up to developers to take care of encryption.
As for developing in the cloud or using cloud-based development tools to
create your application, there are “a new breed of developers” who want
to simply go to the cloud and access tools, sample applications and
best practices guides, Smith pointed out. She said Progress has created
“an arcade” of tools that reside in the cloud for developers to use.
“When we give access to our cloud portal, the developer tools are
available at no charge,” she said. “That’s probably the biggest shift in
developing in the cloud. There is no installation, no download,” and no
upfront cost, she said. “There’s a move away from high-priced
development tools. The cloud says, 'Let’s give access to developer tools
and get paid when people deploy the system.' ”
Smith said that Progress has been doing that for a few years, and after
seeing revenues drop in the first year, the company now has established a
steady revenue stream from the deployed applications. As an example,
she said, perhaps the people using these cloud applications pay the
developer or software company a dollar to use the software; Progress
gets 20 cents for giving the developer access to the tools and support.
The cloud has benefits on both sides of the coin, but developers need to
behave differently and bring new perspectives to the job for cloud
deployments to be truly successful. For now, Smith sees developers using
the cloud as a sandbox to play in before they get serious about
developing and deploying commercial-grade applications there.
But the forecast is for continued cloudiness for as far as the eye can
see.
David Rubinstein is editor-in-chief of SD Times.
Related Search Term(s): cloud computing
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