The hard part is taking such fantastic resources and harnessing these to your particular needs. The Cloud provides many options for fledgling projects and businesses to quickly get up and running, but what if your business is not necessarily going to live in the Cloud?
We face one such problem as we develop our Order Management System. It's an office system for a small company with no particular pretensions to live on-line. So where's the Cloud angle on this? For us the immediate need is to get our application in front of our customers as soon as possible so we can start the customer feedback cycle. However, to go straight to the end system with an on site server to host our application is going to take time and money.
That's where the Cloud provides the window of opportunity, given that our application is built using the mighty Grails framework we can easily deploy our application with Grails on Cloud Foundry. With a minimum of effort we where up and running with a test system that our users could validate new feature and give valuable feedback. With short one week sprints and no fuss deployment we can now iterate quickly and keep the customer engaged in the project.
On the practical side of things we have found no need to have a permanent web presence for our test application, we simply deploy a new instance when we need our customer to test, send them the new URL and then stop the instance when they are done. This keeps the hosting costs to a bare minimum, data is persisted in the Amazon EBS and available to the next deployed instance.
In conclusion, the Cloud is going to influence software development in many ways. Whether you are the next big internet start up, or merely cloud hopping your way to delivering small office systems the opportunity to utilize the Cloud is an opportunity not to be missed.
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