Clouds are all the rage these days. Everybody seems to be using them or selling them or blogging about them. I often hear business people wondering how the cloud is different from, say, the Internet. In a nutshell, a cloud offering is an offering over the Internet or LAN/WAN that is subscription-based and scales to user requirements on demand by leveraging a subscription-style license. Subscribers can subscribe to this service (for example, hardware to extend test environments for three days before an incremental software release). Benefits include buy-as-you-go or the ability for the finance department to write off costs on the income statement (not make a capital expense on the balance sheet). Additionally, it is generally accepted that it is less expensive to pay for and scale as you go compared to the costs of investing in building a data center.

This is a business case for purchasing cloud infrastructure. As a young entrepreneur, he ran a chronically underfunded business that didn’t have enough money to invest in a substantial test environment around load and scalability. For our team to test the effects of heavy use of our software, we would have needed tens of thousands of dollars to build a LAN based/hardware controlled environment. Unfortunately, we didn’t have that much money to spend on capital investments. Fortunately for us, one of our largest customers provided us with theirs, free of charge, and sent us critical load and scale data so we could improve the performance of our products under heavy usage (eg, 100 to 1,000 concurrent users). . These days, organizations offer similar test environments for a fee around consumption on what is now known as public cloud infrastructure. The notion of no upfront capital costs (hardware) and the ease of a service that can be turned off/on without the hassle of hardware or systems management headaches create attractive subscriber value.

Not to be left out in the cold, larger organizations are offering something similar, although they call it something else, the term they use is “private cloud”. Private clouds are similar in concept (on-the-fly infrastructure-based subscription consumption), but the services are provided by business to business (typically from operations teams to development teams).

Through our years of work, more mature software teams working in larger organizations will take advantage of a hybrid strategy. The teams will be looking for the best in class, both public and private, and the behind-the-scenes infrastructure will run smoothly. Hybrid cloud infrastructures are infrastructures that use private (behind the firewall) and public (beyond the firewall) clouds to perform different types of software development. For example, developers on a team can use an internal tool infrastructure to track community-based conversations, but also use the public cloud for on-demand elastic testing from multiple global locations. Teams using a hybrid strategy are considered advanced due to their ability to trace these source and conversation threads through associations. Tracing will improve reusability, reporting, auditability, community building, and feedback in an enterprise cloud development framework.