Developer Changes Moving to Software as a Service
The hurdles for software developers to jump while transitioning to Software as a Service are not very high. Again I’m looking specifically at Azure due to the simplicity Microsoft has put into the platform. Still, Azure is not the only game in town.
Tools used for developing code for Azure are the same ones we have been using for in-house applications. You can write code that works in your local environment, debug and test it, and then deploy it to work in the Azure environment while changing as little as a configuration file.
The biggest difference is the mindset of how your software works, and how to get it to scale. No longer are you constrained only to the number of cores in your server or workstation. Now you have access to as many cores as are alive in your pool of Azure servers. Now you reasonably consider patterns such as Map/Reduce for handling large tasks.
Threading and parallelism are the name of the game in SaaS. Those features, although not critical, for a single process, allow your software to scale supporting one to millions of users. The best part is that there is little difference in the work to write parallel code. It is mostly a matter of learning different syntax and patterns that take advantage of parallel processing.
I would say that is the biggest leap a developer will make moving to Azure is the mindset that they are not working on a single computer as a host to their software; they are now working in an environment built to take your process and host it on the server/processor with the best fit. How cool is that…submit and forget.
Talk to me about your experience moving to SaaS by sending an Email to btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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