Why pre-production in the cloud makes sense

Grazed from TheServerSide. Author: Editorial Staff.

Anyone who has been paying attention to the cloud computing space, from software engineers to enterprise IT managers, knows that there are significant benefits to adopting this increasingly pervasive technology, be it cost savings, increased efficiency or faster development cycles. But there is still a great deal of friction slowing down the PaaS, SaaS and IaaS adoption process. Even the most forward thinking organizations have a lot of fears and reservations about moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. They worry about security. They worry about losing control over policies and access. They worry about governance. They worry about over-provisioning or AMI instances being spun up but never being turned off, resulting in costs spiraling out of control. The benefits of moving enterprise IT to the cloud is well know, but that knowledge doesn’t alleviate the fear.

But organizations shouldn’t let fear get in the way of trying out something that can make them more efficient and help scale out IT operations cost-effectively, so it makes sense to choose an experiment that’s low-risk and gets you immediate benefits. When it comes to easing your organization into the cloud, development, test and pre-production environments are a great place to start…

If there’s one use case that can really take advantage of cloud’s elasticity, it’s dev/test. Developers need to spin up a production-sized environment for just a couple hours at a time. It’s inefficient to keep on-premise physical infrastructure idle most of the time just to satisfy this sporadic need, but this sort of capacity bursting is the perfect use for cloud infrastructure. Many fears about moving infrastructure to the cloud simply don’t apply to pre-production environments. Companies that are subject to lots of regulatory oversight such as banks or health care providers may be precluded from moving production to the cloud by confidentiality requirements or other data security concerns. But testing applications with dummy data is a much lower-risk scenario…

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