Businesses today must quickly develop and applications, particularly apps that allow mobile access to enterprise resources, are essential in order to retain and attract new customers, improve worker productivity, and streamline operations. Unfortunately, the demand for apps is outstripping available development capacity, making quick creation of apps even more challenging. Future market demand for app development services will grow at least five times faster than internal IT organizations’ capacity to deliver them. Competitive pressures to get new applications out the door are causing problems. Traditional approaches to application development and testing are notoriously slow. Developers and testers need quick spin up and tear down of environments to develop and test new applications but are often at the mercy of IT and Ops.

In particular, developers and testers need suitable hardware (including servers, storage, and networking gear), as well as OS software, drivers, databases, middleware, and development tools. They need access to most often used development language’s such as JavaScript, Java, Node.js, and others. The time to get these systems in place can greatly extend the time needed to bring an app from concept to deployment. In most organizations, IT and Ops are bogged down with other work. The growing number of new app development efforts in most organizations adds to the problem as numerous dev/testing projects might be in a queue before yours. How the cloud can help to meet today’s fast-paced development and testing requirements, organizations are turning to cloud services. Regardless where the application will eventually be deployed, cloud services offer fast access to fully-configured environments for development and testing. One option is to use an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering. Most IaaS offerings enable on-demand allocation of compute, storage, and network resources. These resources are managed by the service provider. Such services still require a decent amount of work before developers and testers can get down to work. Typically, middleware, database management systems, and developer tools and languages must be loaded and configured before work can get underway. Another option is to use platform-as-a-service (PaaS). PaaS offerings complement IaaS offerings by adding the required database, middleware, and development tools needed to create and test new business applications.