Many businesses that are considering adopting cloud decide to test its capabilities with their development and test environments. This is a great way to try out cloud; you’ll become familiar with the cloud and experience its benefits without risking production applications and production data. Even if you never decide to move any production applications to cloud, there are good reasons to keep your non-production environments out of your data center. Here are a few of those reasons to use cloud for development and test:
- Putting development/test in the cloud increases productivity. Cloud environments have enormous benefits for developer productivity. There are no longer delays in setting up isolated environments where development teams can experiment with new technology.
- Development/test environments in the cloud are cheaper than in-house development environments. When development takes place in the cloud, you don’t need to invest in hardware. That means a reduced footprint, reduced power, and reduced cooling costs for your data center. Since using cloud means paying just for the resources you need, you don’t need to overprovision servers or leave them idle when a project completes. Just be sure to shut the dev or test environment down.
- Development/test environments in the cloud don’t require ongoing maintenance. With your development environment in the cloud, you don’t have to handle ongoing support and maintenance. The cloud provider handles the bulk of the support and routine maintenance activities.
- Test environments in the cloud can help you identify the right configuration for your in-house production environment. Properly sizing servers is difficult and because the process to add capacity in-house can be time-consuming, servers are often built with excess capacity that leaves them largely underutilized. By using the flexibility of the cloud to create and shut down instances, you can experiment with simulated production configurations and volume to find the minimal configuration that provides the throughput you need.
- Development/test environments in the cloud let you focus more on your on-premises production infrastructure.Because your team isn’t distracted by problems in development and test, they can focus all their efforts on supporting, maintaining, and optimizing the production environment where running applications actually makes your business money.
If you’ve been hesitating to introduce cloud to your infrastructure, consider starting with development and test environments. You’re likely to see benefits that extend to production. Our professional services team will help you understand your requirements and implement your cloud solution. Should you decide to extend the benefits of cloud to your production environment, our managed Amazon Web Services, Oracle cloud services, and Infrastructure as a Service offerings make sure your team feels minimal impact from this technology change. Contact VAST to get help getting started.
