Best Practices for Building Cloud-based Applications

Choosing a cloud platform, or building an application that you plan to deploy in the cloud? Here are a few best practices to make the process easier.

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has been dominating the enterprise IT world for the past few years by promoting the idea of loosely coupled services. Cloud computing is the latest IT trend that is changing how enterprise applications are deployed and delivered to consumers.

Visit any software vendor's website and you will notice that it is decorated with clouds. If you have recently interviewed for a job, your prospective employer would be shocked if you had not heard of this jargon. This article provides an introduction to cloud computing and offers a few best practices for building an application that you plan to deploy in the cloud.

Several characteristics of cloud computing benefit IT organizations. Some of the main characteristics and benefits are:

1. Pay per use -- One of the most important characteristics of cloud computing is its rental and pay-as-you-go model. This greatly lowers startup costs and total cost of ownership. You do not have to worry about purchasing expensive hardware and software licenses nor worry about availability, scalability, reliability and security aspects of your infrastructure, platform or application. You will be charged by the cloud vendor based on the actual usage of resources. This helps companies to focus on innovation and greatly reduces the time required to launch new products.

2. Computing resources available on the Internet -- The hardware and software resources are available on the Internet. These can be accessed by either developers to build and deploy applications or end users to perform their regular work.

3. On-demand and self-service -- The services are available on-demand and users can provision their services themselves. For instance, if you are a developer and you need an application server instance such as WebLogic Server for building and deploying your Java application, you can start a virtual machine running WebLogic Server from a self-service portal within a few minutes. You do not have to worry about locating hardware and installing software. This greatly improves productivity and leads to customer satisfaction.

Source: http://cloudcomputing.internet.com/developer/article.php/425130