You Can Ignore The Cloud no longer…

The drive towards moving our applications to the cloud is undoubtable. More companies are starting to see the major benefits of outsourcing their infrastructure and focusing more on delivering quantifiable business value as opposed to worrying about the particulars of their infrastructure.

The advantages afforded to companies by leveraging cloud infrastructure are both incredible and incredibly numerous. Amazon is currently spending billions a year on improving and expanding their services in order to ensure ongoing domination of the market, other companies are either going to have to innovate faster and provide clearly superior products or undercut Amazon’s prices in order to carve out a slice of this massively expanding market.

In 2017, $122.5 billion was spent on public cloud services in 2017. This amount will increase to over $200 billion in 2020.

This can only be good for us, the consumers, as it allows even the smallest of enterprises to compete in terms of the quality of their underlying infrastructure.

Advances In Services

With the advances in the service offerings of public cloud providers we are able to create websites that are both relatively inexpensive and that are resilient to a higher number of 9s than would have been previously thought possible for a small to medium sized enterprise.

Whilst this may have been possible with a combination of dedicated servers and global load balancers in the past, I can guarantee you that it would have not only been costly, but it would have been harder to set up and ultimately maintain.

Monitoring your entire infrastructure too has become far easier with advances in tooling. Services such as CloudWatch can give you an incredibly intricate view of your entire cloud estate with very minimal fuss and they are only going to gain more features and improve as they get picked up by more and more customers.

Security Built In

For small to medium enterprises, keeping atop of all of the latest security exploits is nigh on impossible. In terms of infrastructure exploits, we’ve recently seen some major CVEs published such as meltdown which have been patched already by the security experts working around the clock to ensure that the AWS infrastructure is up to scratch.

Whilst you may argue that these two most recent CVEs hit cloud providers particularly hard due to hardware choices. Going forward this will not make any real dent in the world’s transition to cloud.

Use as Much as You Need

In days gone by you may have had to buy or rent servers that featured capacity to spare. You would had to have made predictions on things like growth and resource usage and locked yourself into deals that were overly optimistic or more optimistically pessimistic if you were lucky enough to grow heavily!

Capacity planning becomes somewhat less of a burden on team leads looking to ensure that they can meet the needs of all of their customers. With a cloud based solution you can grow, or shrink, to meet the demands set by your customers and subsequently you only pay for the compute resources you require.

Autoscalers can make your life incredibly easy if you’ve architected your application to scale horizontally and allow you to expand and shrink several times an hour should need be to cope with dynamic levels of demand.

Self Preservation

Our jobs as software engineers is to be able to learn and adapt to new technologies as they come. If you were to stagnate and never learn anything more throughout the rest of your career then you will simply be pushed into obsolescence, it doesn’t take a genius to spot this trend, you simply have to look at the market for Fortran programmers today compared to several decades ago.

The number of job opportunities asking for knowledge in concepts such as Docker, or AWS or Kubernetes are growing at an incredible rate and so too are the salaries for those lucky enough to be skilled in this area.

Conclusion

These points are just a few of the very numerous reasons why you can, as developers no longer ignore learning about how the cloud works and how you can leverage it within your own enterprises.

If you enjoyed this article then you may or may not be curious to hear that I’m currently writing a book on learning cloud development through story! You can find this here:

An Introduction to Cloud Development_This book provides a gentle introduction to the world of cloud development. We will be taking an in-depth look at…_leanpub.com

20% of the profit earned from this book will go towards supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and fighting for causes such as Net Neutrality!