Devs don't care about cloud-specific coding, right? Er, not so

Opinion Software developers don’t care about the guts of the backend systems that feed their apps, right?

No, wrong. Programmers are aware of the data centre and the servers that power it, and probably refer to it all as the cloud.

Even Microsoft is trying to shift people to Visual Studio Online to get developers using cloud-based tools. Programming in the cloud, for the cloud, on the cloud. This is supposed to save money: application backend costs come down, application development costs come down, and the price of applications themselves comes down.

Is it tough to write software for the cloud? Yes, kind of, but it’s not as bad as it sounds. When delving into data stored in the backend, input and output becomes upload and download. Everything requires a login or connection, so verifying the identity and access rights of your users and the components of your software is important.

As for scaling, the cloud will give you more of the same. Application storage is cheaper, but may be structured in unexpected ways. Developers may have to do some bodyshop work on their codebase during the migration to the cloud to take advantage of the distributed architecture.

So is cloud programming that radical a revolution? It is the detail that really matters: many on-premises applications seem identical to their cloud cousins, they just differ in terms of their implementation because they scale differently and benefit from dynamically allocated resources.

While we’re just a little while off the arrival of the “cloud developers do it in the data centre” t-shirt, the pizzas for the marathon coding pushes have been ordered. ®