The best time for a cloud app developer is now. Development tools and technologies have advanced so much – and continued to be – to create better apps with each passing day. However, app developers are more under pressure of creating apps quickly with little-to-zero bugs possible, reduced time to market, and frequent update enhancements. Hence, cloud app development comes to the rescue with several unique benefits that can help developers in every day app issues.
Here are those benefits, specific to cloud app development, that come as a solution for challenges app developers face with increasing demands.
1. Scales Your App Up to Manage Loads of Traffic
Scalability is an app’s ability to expand and handle increasing traffic load. For e.g. if your web application gets exposure on a popular site like ProductHunt, you may see a sudden surge in traffic. Your app has to transition from managing a handful of visitors to a thousand fans. At that time, your app must have an ability to take the load of traffic without crashing down. Scalability ensures that your app stands up to the increasing audience without deteriorating its quality in different types of smartphones and leaving a bad reputation.
Cloud app development is known for offering the best scalability possible for an app. It has a power to shrink or expand the app at a moment’s notice.
2. Starts with Low Investment and Saves Cost
One of the key benefits of staying with cloud app development is it doesn’t ask for major investments to get started. One can start small and increase its investment with increasing demands and rising revenue.
Other economic benefits include:
- No Advance Investment: Generally, remote or on-premise data centers ask for large upfront investment to get started. They also require separate money for current and future hardware systems. On top of that, if the customer base increases, the app’s load will also hike, asking for additional charges to maintain the load or add new hardware. Cloud app development saves you from all such troubles as it doesn’t need any upfront investment.
- Pay-as-you-progress: Cloud resources charge only for the time you use them. Let’s say, for features like auto-scaling, you get charged for the servers only when they are running. No cost if you scale them down. Plus, many cloud services work on a price-per-transaction model. It translates to if you stop using them at a certain level, they are completely free.
- No-Cost Disaster Recovery: When you need data to recover from disaster, you need a separate data center which costs you an upfront fee and an on-going investment till the data recovers fully. Cloud app development, on the other hand, is always ready for backups for quick restoring systems. It can handle data recovery while you are only paying for the hardware in use. It means no need to pay for additional provision for recovering data. Plus, you will enjoy a hassle-free data recovery environment, ready to work on whenever needed.
3. Quickly Supplies Development-Specific Resources
All development teams and their project managers ask for quick supplies of required resources so that they can deliver the app as soon as possible. Not only this, they need different types of resources from development and testing teams to experiment with new technologies for the app. In a typical app development environment, it takes days to supply resources which often delay the process.
Fortunately, cloud app developers are empowered to receive all resources ranging from websites to databases to virtual machines that help them create new environments for the apps quickly. In extras, cloud comes with an endless list of services that are always in an expansion mode. It allows cloud app developers to stay ahead of the ever-changing technology. And when their work finishes with particular resources, they switch off from further use.
All in all, you don’t need to wait to complete your app after availing resources. Cloud always keeps them in stock. Good news is you can use this stock to create new customer databases and servers or create other testing resources.
4. Offers Multiple Service Models
Cloud is not a one-size-fit-all shoe. Rather, it comes with a lot of different options to choose from and set your environment as per your unique needs. Basically, cloud offers two models named Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). Both models have their own merits and one can mix the two if needed.
Infrastructure as a Service accounts for having your infrastructure supplied and managed on the internet. It possesses virtual machines, networking components like firewalls, and storage facilities. Your physical hardware receives full support but the operating system and softwares accompanied with license is your responsibility to hold on. It includes taking care of security configuration, operating system updated & upgrades, plus new versions of software.
Platform as a Service extends IaaS further by looking after not only for physical hardware but also operating system and development software. It also covers maintenance of the underlying environment. This frees cloud app developers from responsibilities of building and deploying the apps. Moreover, PaaS includes a large number of services for websites, databases, and other features. You can scale these services as per your app development requirements.
5. Allows You to Host Your App Across the Globe
Another major benefit of cloud app development is geographic reach. You don’t have to rely on a single geographic location to host your app. With cloud, you can host apps from any data center across the globe. Also, traffic management of cloud and global replication of data ensure the best possible performance and experience of your app to customers regardless of their location.
Developers can use content delivery networks (CDNs) to increase global reach even if you are hosting apps from a single location. CDN is a highly-distributed geographic network with proxy servers that directly respond to users’ request for web content. Developers use them to offer quick access to apps, images, audios, videos, and other files accelerating content delivery and improving overall user experience. CDN also reduces requests placed directly from apps for better scale.
6. Comes with Features for Easy Deployment
Cloud app development comes with unique features specifically for deployments. Developers can configure automated builds like deploying code, databases, automated testing, and automatic provision of servers.
Deployment slots also provide potential to conduct no downtime deployment under a production environment. A deployment slot is a separate web app hosted at a different URL (example staging.yourappname.com). By performing deployment to the slot, you can test everything you want. If all is going well, simply swap your app production and staging slot to go live. Another cool feature to try for is route a small part of production traffic to the staging slot. This way you can test new features and ensure everything is going well while opening flood gates.
7. Presents Everything At One Place for Easy Monitoring
Looking at the current agile development world, developers face the challenge of quickly deploying apps and monitoring each function is performing well. When a critical issue arises, they need to be informed about the issue, possess the tools to dig down the cause, and fix it as soon as possible.
Cloud offers tools displaying app performance metrics, logs, errors, and all monitoring systems at one place. It gives you a third degree view of all facets in your app and makes you proactive in recognizing problems before they reach users’ hands. Hence, you hold the full control over solving performance issues that can be spotted down to the service request and the SQL statements.
Conclusion
Cloud app development has evolved greatly in the last few years and demands are growing each year. According to a study by RightScale, over 50% of respondents are using apps in cloud and the numbers are going to rise in future. Now is the chance to grab a big piece of pie.