Coding for the Cloud at Speed and Scale

Spurred by the pandemic, businesses across sectors are increasingly focusing on digital adoption through a cloud-native approach to transform themselves. A cloud-native approach enables them to introduce new business models, foster innovation, improve customer experience and remain competitive. As they race to embrace the cloud, more than ever before, their development teams are being tasked with building cloud-native applications.

Development teams are now at the forefront as their employers are fast-tracking the digital adoption that earlier took over three to four years to just a few months. Most developers today leverage open-source container architectures to configure, deploy, and manage containerized applications at scale – helping software to run reliably when it is moved from one computing environment to another. While extremely valuable for developers, these architectures can also be quite complex.

Solving the challenge of platform deployment

Not all developers possess platform-specific skills to run their cloud-native applications; even if they do have the requisite skills, the entire process often takes a lot of time affecting speed-to-market and blunting their company's competitive revenues and market advantage.

Hence, developers need a solution that can help run their code at scale, making it work on a cloud platform all the while reducing complexity, providing flexibility and security. They should be able to build applications rapidly irrespective of whether they are new to the cloud-native model or they are seasoned experts. The bottom line is that cloud-native development should become more accessible to businesses of all sizes and across industries. A model wherein development teams only pay when their code is running in a platform will help them save money. Moreover, they should be able to focus on code instead of managing infrastructure and deploy their cloud-native applications within seconds. Such a solution can bolster the large-scale adoption of open hybrid cloud across industries globally.

Developers do not want to be held up on infrastructure building and management, which is why they prefer open-source flexibility, auto-scaling workloads, simpler user experiences, and a managed publicly hosted environment. They prefer solutions where they can pay as per consumption and have the features needed by PaaS, CaaS, Serverless, and Batch workloads combined into one platform.

Open hybrid cloud computing must be accessible

Hitherto, solutions that only address one or two aspects mentioned above were available to developers further adding to the complexity they were already facing when building for the cloud. Recently, a comprehensive solution has been launched – the cloud Code Engine, which covers the ability to build, manage and scale cloud-native applications and does not require advanced platform-specific skills. Globally, development teams across major sectors have begun leveraging the solution – for instance, a molecular biology laboratory in Europe used it to rapidly advance its R&D.Given the high volumes of data in Metaspace, the laboratory's proprietary research software, it was highly demanding to run. Using Cloud Code Engine, the research facility found that it was able to greatly accelerate the time it takes to sift through the data.

Another example is of a Nordic logistics solutions company that used Code Engine to build a solution that uses cameras on a warehouse floor to flag errors before they can cause supply chain issues. With the solution, the company was able to ease the strain on its developers by freeing them from having to configure complex code and gave them greater control over their application.

The pandemic has expedited the digital transformation – in a recent global survey by the IBM Institute of Value, 59 percent of participating companies confirmed this trend. Though the cloud is not a destination it is a key enabler for the transformation. However, the cloud can be complicated, and the focus on digital acceleration has highlighted the challenges that can arise – such as the need to learn new skills or work with complex frameworks – all of which can take time. Solutions that help developers use their code with speed and scale and not worry about making it work on the platform are a critical necessity for businesses of all hues – traditional companies as well as born-in-the-cloud digital startups.

The writer is Priya Mallya, Hybrid Cloud Build Team and Developer Advocacy Leader, IBM India/South Asia