Using Cloud Services to Speed Up Your Development Workflow

May 13, 2018 Off By David
Modern software development can be quite demanding in terms of hardware and software resources, and it’s not rare for programmers to invest into high-end machines just for writing code nowadays. When you take a look behind the scenes, it makes perfect sense that things are in this state at the moment, but more importantly, you would probably notice a few opportunities for improving your own situation if you’re clever enough. Most notably, integrating cloud technologies into your development workflow can be a huge boost to your productivity if you do it right.

Complex Computations

If you’re doing research related to data science or anything involving big data sets, you’ve probably already run into some issues trying to wrangle those huge amounts of data on a regular basis. It only gets more difficult as you progress in this field, unfortunately – which is why many data scientists rely on external cloud services for their heavy computations. A quick look at a site like Programering will usually reveal plenty of discussions on similar topics. You’ll typically set up a workflow where you can submit your data to an external service and have it processed while you’re handling other tasks on your end, and you’ll only have to check on the results once the calculations are finished.

Simulations

You can also check how your programs are running on different platforms, if this is a concern in your specific development work. This is important if you’re working on apps that have to be made available for different hardware and software configurations, and while a cloud emulator will not always give you 100% correct results, it’s still far better than trying to guess if your application will work correctly or not. Plus, you can spot some more glaring issues right off the bat and not have to worry about them in production, which can save you a lot of time if you frequently run into smaller problems.

Testing

On a related note, you can also set up some automated testing procedures so that you can keep your software in check without having to do any manual work on a constant basis. This is important if you’re regularly releasing new versions of your programs and want to make sure that you don’t run into any regression issues, which is one of the most common problems in those situations. You can’t – and shouldn’t – rely on customer reports exclusively in order to catch these problems before they’ve gotten more serious, and automated testing is easily the best way to go about that, although it does take some external resources in order to do it right.

Don’t limit your potential as a software developer just because you’re not using external tools correctly. There is a lot to gain from exploring the world of cloud computing and signing up for a service that can boost your productivity like that, and once you’ve integrated it into your workflow on a more fundamental level, you won’t even think about these procedures, you’ll just be doing them in autopilot mode and will be able to focus on the bigger issues with your code more easily.

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