Quick Start: How Clouds Help Reduce Time-to-Market in IT Product Releases

You are more likely to meet your business goals if you release your application to market on time. On the contrary, 20% of products whose launch was postponed for various reasons do not achieve their stated goals.

The increase in Time-to-Market harms the business: competitors can launch an analog during the development period and collect all the cream from the market during the development period. This article uses examples from actual companies to tell how cloud technologies help solve this problem.

Cloud Services Help Automate The Development Of IT Products

One way to reduce Time-to-Market is to speed up the development of your digital services. To do this, they use DevOps – a unique approach to development that helps automate work processes. According to GitLab, developers release code 2-10 times faster after implementing DevOps in almost 83% of cases.

The essence of the DevOps approach is as follows: developers, testers, and administrators are not each responsible for their area but work together on a product, passing code to each other with minimal delays. Thanks to this, the team releases IT products faster and responds more flexibly to changes – for example, it can quickly make changes to the code.

Development automation is closely related to cloud solutions: 96% of companies with a high level of DevOps use a cloud-native approach to development, among the laggards only 24%.

Clouds are popular in DevOps because they offer pre-configured development tools such as databases, test environments, continuous integration, and delivery solutions. The development team does not need to build everything from scratch: they take ready-made tools, customize them for themselves and get to work.

Many companies use Cloud-based tools. Here are some real-world examples:

• Kometrika creates innovative IT products for business and government agencies, ensures their development, implementation, and support. On some projects, the company is fully responsible for the development and operation of the solution; on others, it transfers the finished application to the client. Customers have different infrastructure and security requirements, but they all want development to be fast and predictable. To standardize processes and reduce routine operations to a minimum, Kometrik uses a DevOps approach and cloud solutions. For many functions, standard pipelines appeared, which made it possible to accelerate Time-to-Market by seven times.
• The X5 Retail Group decided to speed up the issuance of IT products; for this purpose, it was necessary to identify IT-power development teams quickly. As a result, the company deployed a private cloud with the help of Cloud Solutions experts. It gave internal teams access to PaaS services. We also managed to implement our solution for development automation. All of this helped speed up Time-to-Market.
• Good is an HR-tech platform with tools for businesses with a high proportion of mass workers. Using solutions from Good, companies formwork schedules, implement incentive programs, and check whether all employees have returned to work.
• Suitable initially built the infrastructure for cloud development and tried to make the most off-the-shelf platform services (PaaS) to help accelerate product launch. Thanks to cloud-based tools, the company expects to restructure the application architecture and reduce the time for rolling out updates from 1-2 weeks to a couple of days.
• Lorus is a logistics service provider with its development department. The company develops solutions for the automation of logistics operations to process cargo faster and minimize human errors.
• Lorus uses a microservice approach when the application is split into many small parts and packaged in containers – thanks to this, different parts of the application can be separately modified and rolled out into production. Now the company is switching to Kubernetes as a Service – a cloud solution for managing containers; it will help test and update IT products faster.

In The Clouds, You Can Quickly Launch a Startup Or Pilot Project At No Extra Cost

If you launch a project on your infrastructure, then order equipment and wait for deliveries – the start of the project is postponed. On the contrary, with cloud solutions, you can start developing right away – there is no need to wait for suppliers.

For this reason, clouds are becoming more and more popular. So, in 2020, spending on public clouds grew by 47% and bypassed the classic infrastructure for the first time.

There are platform services (PaaS) in the cloud – ready-made tools: databases, container orchestration systems (Kubernetes as a Service), machine learning environments. The advantages of the platform approach are that the company’s specialists save time. For example, they do not need to build a database from scratch; they take a ready-made one and customize it for themselves. Also, you do not need to worry about the application containerization platform: the provider provides its work, and the developers and administrators of the company deal only with their application.

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