Cloud for Mobile Development: Scale Fast and Improve App Performance

The cloud’s benefits for enterprises are well known. But less known is how vital the cloud can be to mobile app performance. If you want to scale fast, speed up mobile app performance, and free your staff to work on development rather than maintenance, you should be using the cloud for mobile development as well.

Among the many people saying that is Ray Kelly, CTO at Healthcare IT Leaders, a healthcare-focused IT consulting and staffing company. Kelly told SearchCloudComputing that using the cloud for mobile app development and deployment offers instant scalability, and handles tasks that can be more difficult, expensive and time-consuming to do in-house.

“Customers can just scale [their mobile front ends] as quickly as what Amazon, for instance, can offer today,” he told SearchCloudComputing. He added that companies can save money going to the cloud rather than hosting servers in-house because they don’t need to buy and maintain enough servers to handle peak demands. Instead, they can scale using the cloud, without having the buy the additional hardware.

Michael Facemire, principal analyst at Forrester Research, told SearchCloudComputing that the cloud is also ideally suited for accommodating the unique data access needs that many mobile apps have. He adds that the cloud is also perfectly suited for mobile apps’ security requirements.

Because of all this, the mobile cloud market is booming. MarketsandMarkets estimates that the global mobile cloud market will grow from $9.43 billion in 2014 to $46.90 billion by 2019, at a compound annual growth rate of 37.8%. The firm notes that growth is being driven in large part by how easily the cloud lets companies provision mobile apps.

It’s worthwhile to note that enterprises typically use multiple cloud providers, not just a single one. RightScale, in its sixth annual State of the Cloud Survey, found that in 2017, 85 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy, up from 82% in 2016. It also found that cloud users run applications in multiple cloud services — an average of 1.8 public clouds and 2.3 private clouds. That means that enterprises can use different cloud providers for different purposes.

At Alpha Software, we’re a big believer in deploying mobile apps and web-based apps using the cloud, so much so that we’ve built the Alpha Cloud. Richard Rabins, Alpha Software CEO and co-chairman, notes the key reasons for this in his blog post, The Compelling Case for Deploying to Alpha Cloud, “Even the greatest applications depend on getting the servers set up and maintained properly with scaling, load balancing, failover, and redundancy to achieve appropriate performance levels under real-world usage situations.”