Cloud computing has revolutionized how we develop and deploy software. More and more software is being developed or re-engineered for the cloud to capture the flexibility and scalability provided. However, the platform flexibility comes with its own set of unique challenges.
Let’s dive into some of the common hurdles developers face in cloud environments and explore how to overcome them.
TL;DR: Cloud dev can be chaotic and costly. Pragmatism requires good infrastructure and coding practices, decoupled applications, clear documentation, and ephemeral environments.
The Challenges:
Complicated Setup & Long Onboarding:
Setting up new development environments in the cloud can be a daunting task. It often involves complex configurations, numerous dependencies, and time-consuming installations. Slowing down developer productivity and increasing the burden on development teams to support these environments.
Leading to costly delays for new hires if they are immediately stepping into an unstructured environment.
Architectural Challenges: Tech debt laden systems designed with tightly coupled components can also create significant headaches. Setting up an entire platform instead of focusing on individual applications forces developers to learn the entire stack at once, hindering their focus and increasing the learning curve.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Woes: Inconsistent and poorly implemented IaC practices lead to complex setups, excessive documentation, and difficulty in maintaining and updating infrastructure.
Diverging Development Environments: When developers work in isolation, their local environments diverge. This leads to inconsistencies, debugging nightmares, and delays in deployment.
When one or more developers have divergent environments, there’s a good possibility that features will be developed incorrectly. This leads to delays, rework, and defects in the code.
The Solutions:
Embrace Robust IaC Practices:
Utilizing tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to define and manage your infrastructure as code provides consistent and repeatable build environments.
Implementing version control for your infrastructure configurations allows tracking of changes and easily reverting to previous states if issues are discovered.
Adopting a consistent and well-documented IaC approach across your team is an industry practice that will speed deliveries.
IaC should also be automated to avoid one-off issues and that can further burden the team.
Prioritize Decoupled Applications:
Designing your applications with modularity in mind creates agility in your deliverables. There are numerous architectural patterns that can be leveraged to enable your platform to be decoupled (microservices, event-based architecture, etc.). These decoupled designs and patterns allows developers to work independently on specific components without impacting the entire system.
Containerizing cloud dependencies where appropriate, such as using Amazon’s SNS service, saves the time and effort when setting up the resources in the cloud.
Clear and Concise Documentation:
Maintaining well-documented and up-to-date infrastructure configurations and deployment processes with tools like READMEs, wikis, or internal documentation platforms encourages knowledge sharing within the team.
Through documentation and code reviews, the team gains velocity by a shared understanding of the deliverables.
Foster Collaboration and Consistency:
Encouraging regular communication and knowledge sharing among developers keeps teams aligned.
Implementing consistent development practices and publishing them to a team wiki, which is easily accessible for the team to review the guidelines, streamlines communication.
Consider using shared development environments or containerized development setups to ensure consistency across the team.
The culture of your team and organization will be reflected in how your developers collaborate. Fostering good habits for collaboration and consistency will provide wins for the team. The result will be better confidence among the team to enhance the systems they support, thus providing faster and better results for the business.
Limit Technical Debt:
Almost all the problems discussed are usually a byproduct of technical debt. Have a plan for addressing technical debt and enable your team to execute the plan. By cleaning up technical debt, you can add efficiencies to development environments.
Leverage Ephemeral Environments:
Embracing the cloud concept of short-lived environments, which are created on-demand and automatically destroyed when no longer needed, is new to some teams.
Tools like Docker and Kubernetes make it easy to spin up and tear down containers, providing developers with isolated and consistent environments for each task helping to adopt the concept of ephemeral environments.
The resulting approach significantly reduces setup time, minimizes resource waste, and promotes faster iteration cycles.
The “Pull Request in a day” Goal:
I’ve always admired the “PR in a day” goal. Not necessarily to be implemented as a rule, but rather as a measuring stick for setting up applications, environments, and onboarding new team members. If “PR in a day” can be achieved, the team should be able to navigate the cloud development environments with ease. However, if that number is larger, it is usually a sign that complexities exist and should be addressed.
The ultimate goal is to achieve a streamlined development workflow where developers can confidently make changes, test them locally, and merge their code into the main branch within a single workday.
Summary
The cloud offers unprecedent flexibility and scalability to modern development teams. With these new possibilities come new challenges. The guidelines above will assist you in addressing these challenges to significantly enhance developer productivity, accelerate time-to-market, and improve the overall quality of your cloud-based applications.
Implementing a more efficient and enjoyable development experience within the cloud environment will improve throughput and delivery of features.
Regularly evaluate and refine your processes to ensure their ongoing effectiveness as your team and projects evolve.