Benefits of Cloud Development

So overall, the conditions have become much better, and using cloud development is easier than ever.

The question is now why’d you want to do it.

Indefinite computing power

While you’re limited to the resources your computer has for local development, using the cloud gives you virtually endless computing power.

You can also use specific hardware you couldn’t use otherwise. Here, especially GPUs are relevant as they’re needed for many AI and ML applications.

Also for microservice applications, you may need significant power to get all services up and running, which sometimes is simply impossible to do locally. Companies in such a situation just have to move to the cloud — also for the development, if they want to continue to improve their applications efficiently.

Less setup effort

Getting to run an application can be quite a lot of work, irrespective of the runtime environment.

However, if you use cloud development, it’s possible one person in your team sets up and configures everything, and all other team members can directly start. In the Kubernetes world, this can be done with open-source tools, such as Helm and DevSpace, where you can configure the whole environment that then just has to be deployed in a cloud environment.

This replicability is a major strength of the cloud as there are no differences in hardware or operating systems (unless you want to have different configurations).

It’s also extremely flexible, so you can adjust it specifically to your individual needs. Additionally, the public-cloud providers offer a range of tools and building blocks — just take a look at the services of Google Cloud or AWS.

Together with the huge variety of open-source projects for cloud applications and environments that can be illustrated with the CNCF landscape, you can get started very fast.

New collaboration possibilities and standardization

Due to standardization (expressed in shared configuration files for your cloud environment), it’s easily possible to replicate bugs and to support each other in a team.

It’s even possible to give a colleague direct access to your cloud environment to fix something or to share your work results. This can result in more teamwork and a new form of collaboration in your team in which everybody can contribute their strengths.

Access from anywhere

Since your application is running in the cloud already during development, you don’t have to always use the same computer that has a very specific setup.

You can rather switch your local hardware as you like, which makes it easier if your computer breaks and needs to be replaced. This also supports the modern work culture, such as working from home or on the go.

Living the DevOps culture

Developing software that’s made for the cloud directly in the cloud makes a lot of sense as you’ll always use a very similar environment throughout the whole life cycle of your application.

This can reduce the number of bugs and problems that can otherwise occur after deploying the app to production. For this, cloud-based development will foster the DevOps culture in your team.