Increased Practicality
While cloud computing has been around for many years, it is only now gaining popularity. It has also held promise but has now become practical enough to use professionally. Before, there was a general lack of understanding of how things would work. Over the years, companies have become more acquainted with the idea and have adopted it one way or the other. Along with this, cloud computing itself has matured into a more complete package.
It has become a standard for companies to process production workloads in the cloud. The cloud is now utilized in a variety of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS mediums. The wider adoption of cloud computing in the industry increases its potential in being used for agile development.
Another contributing factor towards the greater practicality of cloud computing is the availability of better internet as well. Of course, developing in the cloud requires only an internet connection. Without a stable and fast connection, cloud development was simply impossible. Nowadays, internet speed is extremely fast and much more stable. The latency is low enough that developers can rely on the cloud connection to be practical enough to work with.
Software Complexity
There is no doubt that software becomes more and more complex each day. Applications are no longer simply CRUD operations that can be hosted on local servers. New applications are moving towards the integration of complex AI and ML operations. Of course, such complexity increases the demand for performance. If not performance, the application may rely upon large datasets which require massive storage. It is no longer in the interest of companies to host rapidly changing hardware themselves. The cloud makes this a non-issue. Scaling, maintenance, and even cost are better managed within the cloud.
Containerization
Softwares used to be dependent on specific environments and operating systems to function. This is no longer the case. Softwares can easily be containerized using third-party tools like Docker. These containers can be deployed and run in practically any runtime.
So, if you have containerized your applications locally, moving them to the cloud is no longer a challenge. This makes it easy to package a deploy quickly in the agile development lifecycle.
