Even though the cloud has become very popular for any type of application deployment, most of an application's development (the actual coding) happens in an offline mode where developers have lDEs on their workstations: they write the code, run the unit tests there, and once everything looks good, it is pushed to the central code repository, which again may or may not be in the cloud. However, once the entire build process runs, the actual deployment of application binaries happens in the cloud most of the time. This is primarily due to a few factors:

• In order to develop in the cloud, they need to be continuously connected to the internet, which may not always be possible.
• The IDEs and tools that the developers are comfortable with using on their workstations have never been designed for cloud-type environments.
• Some customers also fear that their codebase, which is their core IP, may not be safe to be put into the cloud.

I am sure the preceding points are just a sample of possible reasons for developing locally, but most of the preceding fears are totally unfounded. In fact, the cloud has come a long way where if developers are natively developing there, then it not only makes the process easier but also enables them to leverage many cloud services natively in their architectures, which otherwise would need to be coded on their own.

As examples of ongoing improvements in this context, Azure has Visual Studio Code to code for the cloud and likewise Amazon has AWS Cloud9, which helps code with just a browser. In the same spirit, Microsoft also acquired GitHub, which again is focusing on attracting developers and making it easy for them to develop natively in the cloud. In fact, all of this is just the beginning, and with time it will be much easier for developers to natively develop for the cloud, and the entire dev/test experience will be radically different in the future. This will further enable easy global collaboration and have applications created and managed in a decentralized manner.

Future trend #4

Cloud services will enable developers to be first-class citizens by providing multiple different options to effectively develop for the cloud in the cloud.