What Is Cloud-based Application Development?

Cloud-based Application Development is the process of creating and executing software applications on cloud platforms.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the concept of using a network of computers to store, manage and process data. Cloud Computing uses a “pay as you go” model that allows users to pay only for the services they use.

There are many advantages of cloud-based application development, including low initial capital for setting up data centers, sharing data across geographically dispersed locations, scalability, and easy access from anywhere.

The main advantage is the ability to tap into a shared pool of configurable computing resources, such as servers, storage, and networking. This allows for faster innovation and new services at a lower total cost.

Cloud Application Development Vs. Traditional Application Development

The most significant difference between traditional and cloud application development is that cloud-based applications have access to many resources and services. Therefore, it affects the way we architect and design applications so that they can take advantage of the features and benefits provided by cloud platforms.

In a traditional application, companies have to buy and manage their servers no matter how big or small the application is. Cloud-based applications do not need to incur this upfront cost.

Moving an application to the cloud also typically means that you don’t need to worry about server management, such as getting new servers when your existing ones max out or allocating new ones for your growing app.

Serverless Computing

With serverless computing, developers don’t have to think about the infrastructure. Instead, they only have to focus on writing the code.

The cloud provider takes care of provisioning and managing servers, containers, and other computing resources and scaling to meet demand without any downtime.

Serverless computing can be a more cost-effective approach for deploying business applications because it eliminates idle capacity. In addition, the absence of server management responsibilities defines it.

Cloud Services

Cloud services are well-defined components that can be easily integrated with other cloud services. It provides the basic building blocks for you to build enterprise-grade cloud applications and platforms quickly.

When developing cloud-based applications, cloud services form the foundation for platforms and solutions. They are designed to expose specific functionality, such as user management, content management, messaging, notifications, data management, and media services.

Application Gateway

Application gateways provide a single point of entry to a cloud application. In addition, they allow for load balancing and access management, and security functions such as encryption and authentication.

Load Balancers

Load balancers distribute incoming requests across multiple servers. The advantage is that they can also check the health of servers and route around any failures.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source platform for automating cloud deployments and managing containerized applications. It provides a way to package an application with its dependencies into a single unit deployed on the cloud. In addition, it provides tools for scaling cloud applications, load balancing, and auto-repairing issues when they arise.

SQL Databases

Managed SQL databases are a popular cloud service. They provide a relational database for storing and retrieving data from within cloud applications. Automatic upgrades and backup management are key advantages of using managed database services.

NoSQL Databases

Managed NoSQL databases offer storage flexibility and high performance. Cloud-based application development often uses NoSQL databases because they can handle large data sets and multi-structured data more efficiently than traditional relational databases.

Big Data

Cloud platforms handle large sets of structured and unstructured data that can’t fit on a single server or disk.

Big data deals with large and complex data that can’t be processed using traditional relational databases. Big Data analytics help you get more value from your data by combining it with other sources and then finding insights that inform business decisions.

Message Brokers

Messaging services allow cloud apps to communicate with each other through the use of messages. They are an ideal way for applications to share data and process information. Using a messaging service is a must for microservices-based architectures to handle application events and perform asynchronous tasks.

Cache Services

A cloud-based application development strategy includes caching because it provides faster access to data. The most common type of cached data is read-only content that can be accessed frequently by applications, such as images, HTML files, style sheets, scripts, or other static content.

Caching can improve the performance of a cloud app by temporarily storing commonly requested data in memory for faster response time.

Storage Services

Storage services provide on-demand access to persisted data. They are an essential part of cloud services because they allow cloud apps to store and retrieve large amounts of data.

Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a network of strategically distributed resources that act as both origin and destination servers on behalf of end-users.

CDNs speed up content delivery to end-users by distributing cached copies of that data across a network. In addition, CDNs reduce latency by routing end-user requests for content to the edge server that is geographically closest.

Analytics Services

Analytics services include machine learning, reporting, predictive analysis, and business intelligence capabilities for analyzing vast volumes of data very quickly.

Today’s cloud-based applications are expected to support large volumes of users in real-time using the same infrastructure. This requires advanced analytics capabilities to derive insights from data to drive business growth and customer satisfaction.

Machine Learning

Managed machine learning services make it easier to use machine learning capabilities in the cloud. In addition, they provide a scalable and cost-effective solution for deploying machine learning models as part of the application.

Business Intelligence (BI)

Business intelligence help companies gain valuable insights from their data. Cloud-based application development often includes BI services to derive information from data for analysis and visualization.

Cloud Infrastructure

The cloud infrastructure is the core foundation of today’s IT infrastructure. It takes care of managing physical, virtualized, and containerized computing resources.

The three primary components of cloud app infrastructure are computing, storage, and network resources. The three elements of cloud app infrastructure are Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service.

Cloud-based application development has created new opportunities for businesses to drive innovation by leveraging the ability to develop software without spending upfront capital on IT infrastructure. This means that they can use what they need when they need it.

Cloud Platforms

Cloud platforms are the digital backbone of cloud applications. They provide an economical way for businesses to access computing resources without investing heavily in infrastructure, servers, etc. Major cloud infrastructure offers include:

Google Cloud

Platform This is a cloud offering that provides hosted services for building/testing/maintaining applications and managing data. It also offers low rates on cloud storage, robust networking options, etc.

Microsoft Azure

Azure is a cloud platform from Microsoft for developing web apps, testing mobile code in the cloud, hosting websites, etc.

IBM Bluemix

IBM Bluemix is also a public cloud platform that provides access to hosted services such as apps, analytics, infrastructure and integration, security and administration, Watson Services (artificial intelligence), etc.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services is a public cloud platform providing compute power, database storage, content delivery, and other functionality to help businesses scale applications across the globe.

DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean is a public cloud platform that provides virtual machine infrastructure in which users can quickly deploy new cloud servers with custom configurations.

Oracle Cloud

Oracle Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering a full suite of cloud computing services such as bare metal servers, virtual machines, and many others.

Benefits of Cloud-Based Application Development

Businesses get multiple benefits from developing cloud apps. These include:

Scalability

Accessing resources on-demand helps businesses to scale up or down quickly. For example, if it is the holiday season, companies can quickly create more e-commerce servers to handle traffic increases.

Flexibility

Businesses can turn on or turn off infrastructure depending on their needs, thus preventing wastage of resources. For example, during the night shift, e-commerce companies can use fewer servers than during the day.

Lower Infrastructure Costs

Users purchase compute power in bulk, resulting in significant cost savings compared to traditional IT hardware. Customers pay for the cloud resources that they use—there is no need to purchase expensive hardware, software, and other infrastructure components.

Reliability and Availability

A large network of servers backs a cloud app’s infrastructure, so access to the application is not interrupted even during hardware failures, maintenance, and outages.

Customer Support

Cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services provide 24/7 customer support to resolve any issues that users might face with their cloud platform.

Challenges of Cloud-Based Application Development

Businesses may also face challenges when it comes to cloud app development, including:

Selecting the Right Cloud

Choosing the right cloud platform is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses. Users have to understand their requirements and find out which cloud platform best suits those requirements.

Lack of Control

Since businesses do not own their IT infrastructure or system, they cannot change the cloud platform without prior consent.

Hiring Cloud Developers

Hiring well-versed developers in multiple technologies are difficult, and training existing staff on cloud computing principles is expensive.

Challenging to Develop Correctly

Developing cloud apps is more challenging than developing traditional apps because it requires knowledge of several underlying technologies. These include services like databases, security, storage, network management, load balancing, etc.

How much is the cost of building a cloud-based app?

It is difficult to estimate the initial development cost because it depends on the application that businesses want to build. Software development companies would typically charge anywhere from $25 to $300 per hour for cloud-based application development services. Software outsourcing will reduce the cost compared to using an onshore software company.

Conclusion

Cloud-based application development is a rapidly evolving field that offers many advantages over traditional application development. For example, cloud applications are scalable and do not require server management or upfront costs to get started.

Cloud-based application development is an innovative and evolving way for organizations to build applications. The trends in cloud application development are constantly changing, so you should always consider the latest technologies and approaches before embarking on a new project.

If you’re an entrepreneur or business looking for the next big idea in your industry, consider exploring how your company can take advantage of this technology!