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Developer Clouds
The IT industry's innovation speed has always been extremely high
compared with other technologies and market segments. Storage capacities
and CPU speeds have multiplied with mathematical regularity, and software
technologies have developed just as quickly; developer environments have
become more comprehensive and effective, offer prebuilt modules that can
be integrated as needed. Application programs of all kinds have become
more feature‐rich and complex with every new release. Developing software
is expensive, as the development environment must be purchased up‐front.
Today's software developer environments and tools need powerful
hardware environments as well as server landscapes which need to be
available for acceptance tests and approval. It is common that developer
environments are only needed temporarily in projects. Once the project has
been completed, the hardware that is now free for use may be difficult to
put to another meaningful use. Although this is easier for corporations to
handle, due to their larger portfolios and larger customer base, it can be an
insurmountable obstacle for mid‐sized businesses, and especially for new
start‐ups. In the past, if an ingenious idea for trailblazing new software was
raised by a start‐up or mid‐sized IT company, they would have needed to
find investors to cover the costs for establishing the development
environment. An investment of this kind would have been recouped, making
the offer more expensive at the cost of competitiveness. As this is an
entrepreneurial risk, it put many midsized and start‐up businesses off taking
this step. However, if development environments are provided in the Cloud,
up‐front investment is no longer needed. If there are any costs, they will be
in the form of a pay‐per‐use charge for the duration of utilisation. This gives
even the smallest start‐up businesses the ability to be creative. Today, there
are many developer environments in the Public Cloud; known as Developer
Clouds. Large corporations use similar technology and build private
Developer Clouds on their own intranets, to allow for globally distributed
development departments to work on a shared platform. This opens up a
considerable cost saving potential to these companies, but as already
mentioned, there are also many publically accessible, Cloud‐based
developer environments. These environments ‐ typically provided by the
industry's global players ‐ offer everything a programmer needs for software
development and testing, and are billed on a pay‐per‐use basis. This is not
entirely without self‐interest because, once the software is completed,
software operations and distribution are often handled by the same
providers. Anybody who wants to implement their ideas in the form of
software, from students to start‐ups, to mid‐sized and large‐scale
corporations can be a developer in the Cloud.
