Cloud Platform Services: Taking control of app development

• When it comes to the delivery of new Cloud services, speed is crucial, but it can’t come at a cost to quality

By Dain Hansen

When it comes to the development of Cloud services within enterprises we often talk about how speed and agility are crucial. In a previous blog I discussed the importance of ‘fail fast’ innovation to modern digital businesses. As I said then, it’s vital that organisations fail fast and learn lessons even faster. 

An integrated Cloud Platform is key to this scenario. Describing its contribution in a nutshell, it enables app developers to iterate faster – by which I mean to turn out more innovations and new features at speed. 

But within that short sentence lies the fact that Cloud Platforms support app development end-to-end.

Any organisation that embraces this ethic of ‘failing faster’ must do so within a strategic framework. Senior managers who make the strategic decisions within an organisation need to work with IT decision makers to ensure the benefits Cloud Platforms offer for app development, are used to their greatest effect. Just because it is easier to develop using Cloud Platforms does not mean every single avenue needs to be taken. 

Even when you have implemented a regime where no development takes place without a clear strategic case being made for it, you are likely to implement a regime that involves hundreds of incremental releases a year. A Cloud Platform allows you to develop and release at speed – and that’s a good thing. But there are lots of constraints at play. 

Time is a precious resource and there are always new iterations or apps to be developed, so that release schedules are demanding. Naturally, budgets will be invested in developing new apps rather than testing those currently in development. 

In this scenario it is vital to monitor – and learn from – both server side and real user activity. Cloud Platform services, such as those provided by Oracle Management Cloud, can take a central role here. Oracle Log Analytics Cloud Service, for example, is able to monitor activity inside browsers and mobile devices. Oracle Application Performance Monitoring Service meanwhile makes end-user instrumentation simple to deploy. 

The volume of data that logging end user activity generates might have been a problem in pre-cloud days, and today end user logging can generate terabytes of data every day. But with Cloud Platform analytics you have the capacity to interpret mountains of data like this and transform it into a treasure trove of information.

This capability means that even when an app is out ‘in-the-field’, businesses can identify issues more rapidly and fix them before they become a serious problem.

The user is arguably the most important part of the whole equation. Your users may be internal to the organisation or external clients. Either way, they are customers. It is they who take a deep sigh when spotting a problem with an app, they who get impatient when things go wrong, and they who curse when they have a poor experience. 

User tolerance levels are very low and getting lower all the time. When a user gets frustrated enough to complain, you have a problem. This is amplified if you are a consumer facing company. The last thing you need is a twitterstorm of negativity.

Therefore my advice is simply use Cloud Platform services like Oracle Management Cloud wisely to take control of all aspects of app development. It means you can develop at the speed your organisation requires, deploy multiple increments over time, provide user testing features and real-time usage logging, facilitate the analytics you need to interpret this logged data, and in turn make the changes needed quickly, in order to correct errors.

(The writer is the Director, Cloud Platform GTM, Product Business Group @Dainsworld)