As cloud becomes the central development environment, cloud services are aiming to best meet developer needs.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service Growing Astronomically
• Developers Rush Toward the Cloud
• Why Developers are Critical to Your Mission
• Setting the Stage for Great Developers
• The CIO vs. the Developer
• Distributed Storage for Developer-Grade Cloud

Infrastructure-as-a-Service Growing Astronomically

Cloud is growing extraordinarily fast. You probably have heard that, but a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC) backs up what previous analyses have suggested. The IDC report predicts that the amount spent on cloud infrastructure will expand 21% year- over-year between December 2014 and December 2015. It will rise from representing 28% of all infrastructure costs to 33% of them, totaling $32 billion by year’s end.

The rate at which businesses continue to switch over to cloud platforms will continue to be high through the end of the year and into 2016, explains Kuba Stolarski of IDC. “As the market evolves into deploying 3rd Platform solutions and developing next-gen software,” he says, “organizations of all types and sizes will discover that traditional approaches to IT management will increasingly fall short of the simplicity, flexibility, and extensibility requirements that form the core of cloud solutions.”

Developers Rush Toward the Cloud

Who, though, is actually leveraging the speed and reliability of cloud to innovate and get a competitive edge?

A poll conducted by Evans Data gauged usage of certain technologies among a group of 500 developers. By applying the proportions to the broader developer population, the survey suggests that 5 million developers are currently using cloud technology as a platform to build applications. Even more stunning is the extent to which developers say they are migrating to cloud: 9.2 million additional developers are switching to cloud by summer 2016, while only 4.8 million say they are sticking with non-cloud servers.

This large and growing cloud developer community will be figuring out how to deploy platforms that best work to complete their projects.

Why Developers are Critical to Your Mission

The business world is gradually beginning to realize how much control developers have over business success. Adrian Crockcroft, who previously headed the Netflix cloud division, says that understanding the growth of your company in the past can be achieved by looking at the money you’ve made, whereas understanding its growth in the future can be accomplished by looking at how many developers you recruit.

Developers are able to create innovations that will differentiate your company from all the rest, according to veteran technology writer Matt Asay. “Developers are … the ones sidestepping traditional IT to get stuff done,” he explains. “They also are the ones whose creativity will have a far bigger impact on your company’s top and bottom lines than most anything else.”

Setting the Stage for Great Developers

Enterprises can sometimes be too restrictive in the way they treat developers. That tactic is often ineffective, as indicated by the incredible rise of shadow IT – with 83% of enterprises experiencing a shadow cloud.

Developers are certainly not the only ones going outside of their companies’ policies  for IT, but many of them are certainly disregarding rules to accomplish what they want technically. Access to incredible resources for affordable prices simply makes cloud too convenient to ignore.

Of course, the technology being used is just one piece. Developers want to work on projects that are complex and allow them to work their muscles – which is much of the reason that Google and Facebook have been able to recruit great developers, as indicated by a workplace poll from VisionMobile.

The CIO vs. the Developer

It is often difficult for the CIO and the developer to see eye-to-eye, with CIOs being much more interested in private clouds than public ones, explains Asay.

“The CIO … is generally the last to know when it comes to developer preferences,” he says. “Developers embraced open source nearly a decade before CIOs grew comfortable with it, and the same is happening with cloud.”

Gartner Research reveals that public virtual machines are expanding almost 7 times as fast as private ones are. That’s in large part because developers prefer the ease of public cloud – as indicated years ago by Stephen O’Grady of Redmonk.

All the major infrastructure and platform companies understand that their systems must be as developer-friendly as possible. Cloud providers are making it easier for developers to use their systems with specialized tools, guides, communities, and customizable solutions.

Essentially, winning over the development crowd is considered essential to being a leader in the cloud infrastructure or platform industries.

The stakes are high, says Asay. “There are 14.2 million developers up for grabs,” he notes, “and the cloud [service] that makes itself the most convenient and powerful for their needs is going to collect the spoils of cloud victory for many, many years.”

Distributed Storage for Developer-Grade Cloud

Asay says that Amazon Web Services is really gearing itself toward the developer market. That may be true, but AWS does not have the best cloud. Our use of InfiniBand technology and distributed storage, with no single point of failure or bottlenecking, provides performance that is typically four times that of AWS.

By Kent Roberts