Cloud apps mean developing in days, not months: IBM

Here is a speech on the nature of cloud development by an IBM expert 

This shift toward applications that begin life in the cloud has changed the way that businesses need to develop, Carr said. He explained that while cloud is certainly about moving or using "systems of records" applications such as SAP, enterprise resource planning, and human resource management systems in the cloud, newer "systems of engagement" applications have a completely different application-development life cycle.

"There's a new class of tools. There's a lot of buzz about Hadoop, big data, PHP. Not what I typically see in big enterprises. Ruby, Python; these are all sort of these new scripting tooling that a new generation of developers are using to get things done."

He said that previously, a company might have a developer team of about a hundred people to produce such a product, but when looking at a system of engagement today, a small team of developers does the same.

And they're doing it faster. Previously, developers would spend months, even years, on an enterprise-grade application. Carr said that this needs to come down to days or weeks.

Similarly, he said that these heavy tools would take months to integrate into an organisation's business practices, but this model simply couldn't work with newer applications.

"We need to do this in a continuous way. We need to continuously release. We need to deploy, not only applications very quickly, but we need to be able to deploy our infrastructure very quickly."

The infrastructure itself also plays a different role in these new applications, Carr said, and that while systems of records applications rely on the underlying infrastructure for availability and reliability, that wasn't necessarily the case for newer systems of engagement.

"These things are built in to the application. We're looking for continuous availability and scalability," he said.