Wednesday 08 September 2010
The case I have heard very recently about how the cloud can improve application development goes something like this. Developers have a need to spin up complex environments for development and the cloud makes it easy to do that. In addition, the cloud makes it easy to provision test environments. First of all, most developers are working on their own computer. For example, Java developers will have an IDE like Eclipse that is integrated with a Web Server, possibly a local database, and perhaps a connection or two to some outside “development” databases. As developers write code, they are constantly testing.
Write a few lines. test. Write a few more lines. Test. Debug. Write a few more lines. Check in the code. Come back tomorrow. Every developer knows this develop-test cycle. They do it constantly throughout the day. What developers could use is a Personal Cloud that would allow them to configure their local environment in multiple way and take it with them wherever they go. I know this sounds like virtualization and it is to some extent, but extend PC virtualization with cloud concepts and you get the Personal Cloud. Because developers who write code are also constantly testing that code as they work, the best case is to keep the dev environment local and use application lifecycle management(ALM) tools for collaboration. That is just more efficient. Every few days or perhaps every couple of weeks, a couple or JAR files or perhaps and EAR file will be deployed to a test or UAT machine that is configured for testing by QA or end-users.
