Tapping Innovation: How Developers Leverage Cloud

• Introduction: Developers Key in a Data-Infused World
• Cloud as a Critical Tool for Development
• The Role of Open Source
• True Distributed Cloud for the Best Results

Introduction: Developers Key in a Data-Infused World

Developers are essential to the new economy. First, just think about the scale of data – even from a year ago:

• Think your post is important? It’s got competition. Every minute, 2.5 million instances of Facebook sharing occur.
• Do you think search engine optimization might be important? Do you think it might be getting more sophisticated? Every single minute, over 4 million search requests are placed with Google.
• Do you want to make a living off of your YouTube show? So does your neighbor. Every minute, 72 hours of new video is uploaded to YouTube.

In other words, the sheer amount of raw activity occurring in the digital universe is staggering.

Because that activity is so intense, data is becoming more valuable all the time. Forbes Data Driven Business editor Howard Baldwin points out how powerful data is by looking at two companies, one that is data-based and one that is physical. Baldwin contrasts Facebook to a major airline, United Airlines, which he describes as “a company that actually owns things like airplanes and has licenses to lucrative things like airport facilities and transoceanic routes between the U.S. and Asia, among other places.” Facebook is worth an estimated $200 billion, while United is valued at $34 billion.

Cloud as a Critical Tool for Development

When we talk about developers, the special knowledge may make it seem like a niche profession, which is not at all the case. As data expanded, the job market expanded. There are now 18.5 million developers worldwide. All of these people want the best tools.

One tool that developers have found is obvious for many projects is cloud hosting, which means that you can get whatever resources you want with a credit card. That simple accessibility makes these systems immediately more user-friendly and accelerates projects.

Flexibility is another key benefit that developers get from the cloud, explains Megan Swanson in Wired. “The cloud … means that developers can quickly increase their demands on the infrastructure if they need to test some code or run much larger data sets than originally expected,” she notes. “The cloud is elastic and can accommodate almost unlimited demand.”

Before the cloud era, the challenge of creating applications to work on different types of servers slowed down the process for developers. Huge amount of time were lost as they figured out hardware specifications and molded apps to fit the infrastructure. Today, it’s a snap to get everything underway.

Plus, cloud is familiar to recent college graduates who have been working with the cloud already. It makes the transition easier when these young programmers start their own companies or jump into development positions.

Developers also don’t have to worry about security nearly as much when they work with a long-established and respected cloud provider. Rather than being fundamentally responsible for security in-house, their system is already protected by an organization whose reputation relies on its ability to ward off intrusion.

The Role of Open Source

Another aspect of development that is often part of cloud projects is open source, comments Swanson. “Sharing the code for operating systems and basic utilities, and contributing to debugging and trouble-shooting, means that individual developers can spend more effort on applications,” she says.

Open source is effectively the antithesis of vendor lock-in, making it much more possible to migrate to other hosting services. It is essentially coder-friendly, making it unnecessary to learn a comprehensive new set of rules when transitioning to another job or when a workplace decides to use a different host.

Open source, used in conjunction with cloud, unleashes the potential of your developers. Since they aren’t getting ensnared in hardware and networking concerns, they can center their efforts on building incredible programs to benefit users.

True Distributed Cloud for the Best Results

Cloudy itself is an incredibly powerful technology, as established above. As Swanson puts it, “The era of cloud computing has enhanced the epoch of the developer,” adding that the technology “lets [programmers] focus on making applications that create new functionality, new business opportunities and even new industries.”

You want to make sure that the cloud you use is truly cutting-edge, though. Distributed storage is absolutely essential, but centralized storage – a dinosaur remnant of the mainframe era – is used by the vast majority of cloud providers.

Why is distributed storage preferable?

1. No single point of failure – Even multiple node failures have no impact on performance.
2. No bottlenecks – The design of distributed storage is simply superior.
3. Much, much faster – Local disk I/O that puts centralized storage to shame.