Why Agile and Cloud Are the Perfect Match
In our dynamic and ever-evolving digital landscape, adaptability makes all the difference.
To stay competitive, companies must quickly respond to sudden demand changes, new legislation and emerging technical innovations.
This makes agile methodologies and cloud solutions a perfect pair — synergising the flexible, on-demand, pay-per-use scalability of cloud computing with the quick iterations of agile software development.
Shorter turnarounds for rapid rollouts, cost reductions, regular updates, continuous stakeholder input and expanded collaborations — the benefits of agile cloud development make it the optimal approach for accelerated delivery at premium quality.
Discover how agile cloud software development can grow your business below.
What is Agile Cloud Development?
Defining Agile Cloud Development
Traditional development methodologies like Waterfall are strictly linear, requiring each phase in the process to complete before the next can begin. While useful for projects that depend on comprehensive documentation, such approaches place an enormous burden on planning — decreasing adaptability, collaboration and innovation.
By contrast, Agile methodology approaches every project as a series of rapid, bite-sized phases, each following a repeating, cyclical structure: plan, design, develop, test, deploy and review.
Rather than adhere to a rigid predetermined development process, the Agile philosophy emphasises continuous experimentation, iteration and feedback. Teams quickly and effectively respond to technical challenges and customer experiences, driving innovation while mitigating risk, resulting in higher success rates at significantly reduced cost.
Agility and cloud solutions make an ideal match, prioritising flexible yet controlled scalability, increased efficiency and collaboration.
Core Principles of Agile in the Cloud
Continuous Integration & Deployment
Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) automates the process of incorporating, testing, validating and releasing code changes to a common source code. Developers can set modified code segments to seamlessly merge with the shared repository, assured that all updates have been assessed beforehand automatically.
The reduced dependency on hands-on code integrations minimises both labour costs and downtime, producing faster, cheaper and higher quality code, eliminating conflicts between updates.
Moreover, frequent testing and feedback throughout the development cycle vastly improve product quality and customer satisfaction. The result is faster deployment, optimised resources and continuous enhancements.
Flexibility & Adaptability
Being able to respond to changes in competitor offerings, new technologies or compliance requirements spares developers from becoming locked into producing software that may not earn the necessary ROI. Businesses can scale when profitable at lower risk, and customise their offerings in accordance with changing customer preferences.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Agile cloud software development models seamlessly connect developers and operations, nurturing the ideal environment for accelerating breakthrough innovations.
Why Businesses Need Agile Software Development in the Cloud
Speed & Faster Time to Market
Agile approaches shrink development times by rapidly iterating through versions and updates, rolling out features regularly and in quick succession. These sprints enable organisations to accelerate development cycles without sacrificing quality.
A case in point is a capstone team which embraced an agile approach to feature rollouts and vastly increased their productivity, shrinking their development cycle while continuing to improve their offerings. They modified specific aspects of their process, including redefining roles, tracking their daily output and moving meetings to an asynchronous schedule to enhance communications.
Scalability & Cost Efficiency
Companies invest heavily in expanding product capacity, sometimes overspending when demand fluctuates.
Fortunately, cloud-based software enables organisations to stay flexible with on-demand scaling, providing a pay-as-you-go model so that customers buy only what they use, and thus massively reducing development and operational costs.
Improved Collaboration & Team Efficiency
Post-pandemic businesses rely on team members from around the world collaborating on projects remotely, even across time zones.
Agile frameworks’ emphasis on constant communication and feedback easily accommodates asynchronous international teams, allowing developers and operations to harmonise their efforts without risk of stalling projects or undermining quality.
Agile Methodologies in Cloud Development
Scrum & Kanban in the Cloud
Agile philosophy works well with synergistic tactics like Scrum and Kanban.
When applying a Scrum approach, developers iterate in short successive cycles called sprints. Kanban, in turn, visualises project phases and workflows to optimise development for the fastest viable product. Together, ‘scrumban’ tactics ensure teams rapidly improve product quality at peak efficiency, reducing the centrality of planning, and dynamically responding to user feedback for continual improvements.
Scrumban development allows cloud development companies to build only what they need. This avoids over-investing in producing features or maintaining servers that customers do not use, as continuous user feedback and pay-per-use models become constitutive parts of the process.
For example, when UK-based cloud solutions company Mayden struggled to deliver projects timeously and to the satisfaction of their clients in the healthcare sector, they switched from a Waterfall approach to Scrum. This enabled them to incorporate and fulfil changing requirements while completing iterations in short order.
DevOps & Agile Cloud Development
DevOps efforts to unify development, operations, quality assurance and security into a single process go further within an agile framework. The frequent and extensive collaborations ensure otherwise disjointed components of production and delivery can regularly rollout reliable software at an accelerated pace.
Microservices & Agile Cloud Architecture
Agile cloud development supports a wide array of modular, microservices-based applications, as the flexible production process allows teams to easily divert resources towards independent features as the business scales. Developers can efficiently add, integrate or pause individual microservices according to changes in user preferences at minimal risk to the company.
Challenges of Agile Cloud Development & How to Overcome Them
Security & Compliance in Agile Cloud Environments
Updating data-protection measures in accordance with emerging privacy laws has never been easier than with agile cloud development.
Developers continuously roll out enhanced security features with immediate effect, ensuring companies keep up with regulatory requirements and practise safe information governance.
Managing Rapid Changes & Scalability
Demand fluctuations can complicate development cycles, as companies struggle to address the changing needs of users without overspending.
Fortunately, Agile development leverages the flexibility of cloud services with the responsiveness of tactics like Scrum to ensure companies have total control over their own growth.
Integration Challenges
Agile cloud methodologies streamline cross-platform communication, simplifying hybrid and multi-cloud integrations for rapid on-boarding with minimal security risk.
Future Trends in Agile Cloud Development
AI & Machine Learning Integration
Advances in artificial intelligence will continue to enhance more sophisticated agile cloud apps, incorporating improved analytics, security and automations.
Serverless Computing in Agile Development
Innovative production models free developers of traditional infrastructure constraints, allowing them to deploy new software and updates in a fraction of the time.
Edge Computing & Agile Cloud Solutions
Computing and storing data closer to data sources, rather than in centralised data repositories, provides a distributed system for low-latency processing, improving user experiences and accelerating productivity by reducing wait times.
Why Choose JustSolve for Agile Cloud Development?
At JustSolve, our award-winning development teams never rest on their laurels.
Our proven track record for rolling out secure, scalable cloud applications across sectors as diverse as healthcare, finance, mining and more only motivates us to raise the bar further, as we continue to lead innovations in digital transformation.
We are proud to have built a variety of agile cloud applications, such as a global shipping app, a healthcare app for a medical provider, streaming payment processing and field sales apps, customer self-service portals and many more.
Embracing Agile Cloud Development for the Future
Agile project management — with its focus on sprints, iterations and collaboration — perfectly synergises with cloud development’s goal to make data management efficient, secure and flexible.
The centrality of collaboration ensures high success rates at minimal cost, while decreasing the burden on planning, and ensuring companies can scale responsively in the face of sudden changes in demand and customer needs.
Book a call with JustSolve today — and grow your business with custom software from the experts in agile cloud development.
