Software engineering in the cloud

Abstract

The computing infrastructure on which engineers develop and deploy software has evolved significantly in recent years. The rapid growth of cloud computing services mean that infrastructure and platform components are becoming more decentralized (owned by others, often far away from the development or operating organization) and more elastic (with the ability to provision and deprovision them at will). Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) capabilities provide the raw resources needed to deploy software-computing, storage, and networking. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings provide important software components as commodity services-databases, identity and access management, security, analytics, various kinds of middleware, and much more. New virtualization and packaging techniques for software that can take advantage of cloud computing, such as containers, provide new opportunities for rapid and automated testing, deployment, and scaling of software systems. This enables new software delivery models, such as continuous deployment of new software to production environments and frequent, transparent A/B testing of new features. These changes are having an impact on software development environments, as well, with more development tasks and workflowsteps moving to the cloud. This chapter will briefly explore these technologies and their relationships to one another, and explore their impacts on the practice of software engineering.