English | EN Is Cloud a return to the Stone Age?
May 15, 2014
I have been involved in multiple application development projects recently that are using a PaaS provider (some real PaaS provider, some not really, but that’s not relevant). My first impression was: Welcome back to the future, the 80’s!
Everything looked very promising at the beginning and I was very excited to finally do a real Cloud application development and deployment. But I quickly discovered a lot of limitation on these PaaS provider. For example their API were not consistent, you hit a limit number of request per second/minutes, some limited un-documented quota appears when doing some stress test on the application, the bill for the DB access and usage increase very quickly, etc.
I can understand that these platforms are shared, and the people usage are unpredictable. They need to manage resources carefully in order to provide all applications needs. Even if I was not around in the 80’s, I felt like it was like all the story people are telling when they had very limited resources when developing in Assembler or something else.
“Optimize your code!”
These experiences on Cloud development emphasize the need of code optimization. With PaaS provider, you just don’t have any choice, if your code is not perfect, it’s going to run very slowly and poorly. If your SQL request are not optimized and limited, the bill is going to be very high and you won’t achieve the cost reduction benefits of using the Cloud. If your data management and access is not correctly designed, the application will be slow and the bill high. Poorly developed code costs companies in PaaS environments.
Even if some limitation of the PaaS provider are due to the young age of this kind of platform, most of them are in fact helping developers to really think of theirs algorithm and how to optimize them. This step back in resources management – yes I am used to have unlimited resources 🙂 , is two steps forward in application development.
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