Enterprises, organizations and governments have seized the benefits of the cloud’s flexibility, cost savings, and connectivity. Yet the traditional approach to dev/ops is decelerating cloud economies of scale. The known physical economies of scale focus on saving enterprises and customers the labor and maintenance costs of managing the data center’s physical footprint. The next level of savings is focused on the production footprint - the cloud as the new design center.
Design Economies of Scale
Why stop with the physical economies of scale when you can save on the costs of design overhead? Save time, IT resources and capture the design economies of scale: migrate, then renovate/innovate in an environment that is both agile and secure. With the cloud-based design center, the concept of saving precious infrastructure has been replaced with a need to save the development team’s precious time.
Most developers cannot possibly predict the needs, capabilities and budgets of their customers when beginning a new project. Currently, developers are building out services for the cloud but then worrying about optimizing their app for a certain cloud, a certain criteria or a different optimization that comes at a lower price point. What is a developer to do when looking down the barrel of rapidly evolving cloud targets, sensitive budgets and enterprise IT administration?
Waste Infrastructure in the Cloud Design Center
There is no need to lose sleep over how to correctly forecast the architecture and infrastructure before building. The new cloud design center offer a new way of developing, building and testing new instances and resources as needed.
Developers can start with production and use the flexibility of the cloud to build and tear down production footprints to use more fast, powerful resources to keep design stages innovative and geared toward the target production. Quickly move past the old steps of develop, test, migrate, deploy then re-architect. Cloud design centers also allow multiple parallel streams of work on identical yet distinct copies of application topology.
An international trust used this model to begin with a realistic development and infrastructure in mind. The greenfield project began immediately as both a development and testing production stage, capitalizing on the plentiful infrastructure to define a faster route to a realistic target environment.
Get in the Cloud Express Lane
Going through the traditional dev/test steps before migrating to the cloud is similar to sitting in deadlock traffic while cloud designers are zooming by in the the express lanes. Skip the worries and tie production and development closer together with the automation and testing in the cloud environments, not to mention the time you can save from working in a safe environment rather than risking any “dark ops” security issues. Development needs maximum scalability, redundancy and availability, the cornerstones of cloud offerings, now with agile guidelines to open up to innovation rather than narrowing by avoiding risk.
Will you be stuck in traffic, or can the cloud offer you a ticket to the express lane of development?
