Why Cloud Development Environment is Better than Desktop Development?
In the recent years, the tech world is starting to be largely dominated by cloud development. The industry, whether it is sales, marketing, finance or support, they are planning to use cloud based applications to get instant access. There is a shift in application development priorities because the cloud is altering the way applications are designed, tested and utilized.
The cloud has also begun to impact the tools and support solutions that drive IT. This includes performance management, configuration management, backup and recovery, data centre automation, release managementand helpdesk. The swiftness in the services is further penetrating the developer’s space.
In spite of this transformation, developers are still using desktop IDEs (Integrated development environment). Why are they hesitant to shift to cloud development environment?
Desktop development environments are becoming outdated, therefore the conventional applications are shifting to cloud. The complications, failures and productivity cause difficulty to the developer and here is why:
Complicated configuration management:- Configuration management is difficult since the developer works partly as a system administrator. Desktop applications are error prone, slow and challenging too. Software installation has to be made on multiple desktops on which the developers are working with similar operating systems and configuration to operate the components identically. The synchronization becomes difficult.
Decreased productivity:- Many IDEs take the lion’s share from the memory and disk space with considerable boot time. It requires maximum resources and high speed which is unavailable thereby decreasing productivity.
Limited Accessibility:- Remote access is restricted through desktop applications as it is not accessible through your mobile phones. While there are a few solutions like GoToMyPC but it is very slow and a tedious task to do.
Poor Collaboration:- Developers work as a team now-a-days therefore communication and collaboration is vital. And as these are missing in desktop IDEs, developers are left with no other options than to go for other means of communication.
The Solution: Cloud development
Moving desktop development work space to Cloud Development Environment is the solution to all these problems. Usually a developer’s environment comprises IDE, the local build system, the local runtime to test the locally edited codes and integration between these components. It is dependent on several tools such as “Continuous integration” or certain web tools, third party services, specific data stores or other applications.
Ease of access, ease of sharing and providing centralized platform are the biggest advantages of cloud based work space. All the developers can co-work to debug, test run or co-build the program. Communication on central platform gives pair programming altogether a new dimension. The cloud workspace can provide improvement in system density and efficiency by providing every individual work space a considerable cut of the available memory.
There are endless possibilities into reaping the benefits of cloud development environment. Much of the work is done but much more can be done to tap the interminable potential.