Ten Reasons Software Developers Need the Cloud

Developers need cloud development environments? Why? Bottom line, developers need more than one development environment, and they need cost effective, agile ways to manage their development environments. Consider the following cases:

1. You branch your source code and need multiple environments to validate changes
2. You are in the middle of testing a software upgrade, configuration change, or architecture improvement and need to validate code against both new and older versions
3. You are doing some R&D and need a separate testing environment
4. A big project requires you to add several developers and testers to the staff temporarily
5. You are testing builds for special use cases; different data sets, different customers
6. You need to test with larger data sets that are hard to manage on "local" development environments
7. You are developing multiple applications against a common code base and desire separate environments to validate changes
8. You want to run an internal (or external) coding exercise, training, or contest and need to scale up environments for a short period of time
9. Your development environments have fallen out of sync and migrating to the cloud simplifies establishing a single development configuration
10. It might actually be cost effective (probably, likely) to use the cloud rather than investing in desktop environments, shared servers, or virtual servers for development purposes.

Especially now that AWS EC2 supports the most common development environments (Lamp, Java, .Net, Ruby) and databases (Oracle, MS SQL, MySql) and has support for private clouds, many development organizations might benefit from leveraging the cloud for their development environments.