Mistakes To Avoid In Cloud App Development

By Author: Susan Smith
Total Articles: 132
Comment this article

Cloud computing is one of the most popular trends followed in the modern enterprise. Most organizations are rapidly deploying cloud based mobile apps and the demand for this software is very high in the worldwide mobile market. However, mobile application developers are facing multiple challenges while building apps for the cloud. These challenges arise from the mistakes committed at the time of cloud app development. Frequent mistakes to be avoided while creating cloud mobile apps are:

Use of traditional app architecture – The traditional architecture used for building mobile apps in general are not well equipped for creating both public and private cloud based software. The traditional architecture can be used for hosting apps and inheriting management or deployment values, but writing codes for cloud based apps using the traditional tools is not recommended. This is because of the fact that cloud based apps, like all things virtualized, are shared in nature. This leads to ill patterns of working and reduced reliability if traditional architectural methods are used for building apps on the cloud.

Dependence ...
... on human as opposed to automated workflow – All mobile apps and business models leveraging the cloud allow users to enjoy high amounts of flexibility at the time of operating the software. But using only human workflow means that the flexibility will become limited as in the case of non cloud and non virtualized environments. On the other hand, automating the processes of changing price points, dealing with collections and billing, modifying entitlements, rolling out app upgrades, fixing bugs, and dealing with chargebacks in the IT sections of an enterprise will lead to more flexibility and hence enhanced productivity. Sticking to the manual workflows will result in terrible inefficiency of productivity and will thereby undermine the cloud’s values and put your organization at a disadvantageous position.

Ignoring the operational lock in risk – Several cloud platforms (a special mention should be made here of the PaaS infrastructure) help businesses to extract very interesting operational values, but often lead to lock in risks. Use of specific infrastructures and APIs raises the level of risk involved. In most cases, the app code runs only on a single platform, it refuses to operate effectively when used in other platforms. Though this may not seem like a major problem to most enterprises, the reality is that the security, reliability, and performance of a cloud based application can change in this case, especially if the software is used in separate hosting environments. The developer must therefore remember to choose cloud technology which is proprietary and cloud platforms which draw a line in providing value for infrastructure and making programming decisions that are independent of the architecture. In order to further reduce the possibility of the lock in risk associated, identification of cloud middleware which is layered on the cloud infrastructure is essential.

Whether a mobile app developer wants to build software for the public cloud and sell it to multiple businesses or build custom enterprise IT apps for the private cloud, it is necessary to distinguish between the traditional app building tools and the cloud app architecture. According to mobile market researchers, a clear distinguishing of the two will enable app developers to avoid the above listed common mistakes that they commit while designing mobile software running on the cloud.

The author is associated with a well known iPhone application development Dallas firm and Android app developers in Delhi providing app development solutions to enterprises