Executive Insights on Native Cloud Development

This article is featured in the new DZone Guide to the Cloud: Native Development and Deployment. Get your free copy for more insightful articles, industry statistics, and more!

To gather insights on the state of cloud development and deployment today, we spoke with 15 executives from 13 companies that develop tools and services for companies to develop in, and deploy to, the cloud.

Key Findings

The solutions mentioned most often in developing in and deploying to the cloud is Node.js and PHP, followed by web services, AWS, and tools like Docker, Jenkins, Ansible, and Chef. A total of 32 different software and solutions were mentioned in addition to each of the interviewees producing software and solutions that their customers use to develop and deploy to the cloud.

The most important elements of cloud-based development and deployment are speed, automation, integration, and scalability. The big advantages to developing and deploying in the cloud are speed and agility, faster feedback to developers, and faster debugging. Defining the process and automating allows very fast development, deployment, and iteration, which enables developers to be more efficient and productive getting feedback in a timely fashion. The ability to deploy, back-up, and implement multi-cloud replication without sacrificing complexity or ease of management or increasing latency are all huge benefits. Finally, scalability and the ability to call for resources on-demand makes it easy to create and destroy resources on a consistent infrastructure while trusting your infrastructure can keep up with the workload generation and processing.

The problems being solved with cloud deployment and delivery are scalability, stability, ease of use, and speed. The key to faster, more reliable software development is a DevOps process in a cloud environment that ensures testing and security are continually monitored. Ultimately this enables developers and companies to make products and services that make the end user’s life simpler and easier with a “fail fast, succeed fast” environment. The cloud has made developers more effective and efficient and forward- thinking companies realize it doesn’t make sense to waste resources, managing hardware on something that’s not their core competency.

Development and delivery in the cloud has evolved with the tools and services that facilitate the automated and efficient delivery of quality code and apps. Better tools and more advanced services, including containers, enable developers to focus exclusively on their business logic. Cloud providers are doing a good job keeping up with the demand, making better and more flexible services available. The tools seen in existing enterprise frameworks can be mirrored to exist in the public cloud. This ensures that what is developed in one cloud is easily transferable to other environments. Elastic ephemeral computing is moving to data to ensure the reliability, scalability, and speed necessary to provide real-time operations and analysis to drive business value.