In this lengthy article, InfoQ asked a panel of cloud computing experts for advice on transitioning to cloud development. Here are a couple of key takeaways.
Developer evangelist Adron Hall says the cloud requires a different toolset because “a cloud developer builds application across a wide spectrum of resources, is often found breaking the divisions of functionality in an application apart into more specific services or modules. The cloud developer also generally needs to step into a more polyglot toolset, ranging from JavaScript to C# to Ruby to other languages.”
Microsoft’s Magnus Mårtensson cautions against applying “old thinking to a new paradigm. For instance authentication; ‘We want to enable our customers to use their existing Google, Yahoo!, Facebook and Microsoft account to authenticate with our service. And of course we also want the standard username/password login.’ Find the flaw! Basically they are saying they want to go through some lengths to be very hipster and then retract it by bringing their grandma to the party.”
Cloud Foundry’s Andy Piper adds, “There’s a definite tendency to think in traditional terms and build for scale-up not scale-out. In that sense I’m always surprised when a developer ‘discovers’ asynchronous messaging like RabbitMQ and in-memory data structure services like Redis and thinks – wow – this is *whole new way* of doing things. No, they really are not, these concepts have been around for a long while, and cloud platforms make idempotent, eventually consistent service patterns more important than ever.”
