Building Tomorrow’s Applications on AWS Today

Clients may decide not to use their in-house development teams for several reasons:

• Talent Pool: Outsourcing provides access to a global talent pool, enabling the selection of highly skilled developers who are experts in their respective fields, such as modern application development and modern application architecture. This is particularly beneficial when the required skill set is scarce or unavailable in-house.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Outsourcing is often more cost-effective as it eliminates overhead costs, provides faster skill set acquisition and allows for easy scalability, essential for scalable applications and modern apps.
• Faster Build Time: With established processes and expertise in CI/CD, outsourced teams can deliver projects faster. They often have ready-to-go teams that can start working on the project immediately, reducing the time to market for cloud application development.
• No In-house Capabilities: Outsourcing is a viable option when there’s a lack of in-house capabilities or knowledge in specific languages or technologies. It allows companies to focus on their core operations while the outsourced team handles the development tasks.

Even with AWS familiarity, developing a cloud-first application differs from traditional practices. It adopts a microservices architecture, contrasting with monolithic structures. It also emphasizes rapid, internet-delivered services, scalability and early security integration in the development cycle. This modern approach, focused on cloud environments, requires a unique skill set and considerations, such as those needed for modernizing legacy applications with cloud, making it a different practice despite existing AWS infrastructure knowledge.

Unlike on-premises solutions, serverless technologies manage developers’ server handling, letting them focus solely on writing code. They offer on-demand usage, event-driven execution to minimize downtime costs and simplified code creation processes, which is a key component of modern application development.

You pay only for features used, reducing operational costs. Serverless technologies enable isolation boundaries for enhanced security and containerization for simplified testing and packaging, streamlining the development process and promoting efficient, cost-effective and secure cloud application development.

Serverless computing differs in how it handles infrastructure management tasks, unlike IaaS, where you manage the underlying infrastructure; PaaS, where you manage both infrastructure and runtime environment; and BaaS, which provides backend services. In contrast, serverless computing auto-scales resources and charges based on actual usage, fostering more developer-centric operations, quicker deployments and cost efficiency. It streamlines the development process, eliminating the granular control of traditional IaaS, BaaS and PaaS structures.

Modern application development can leverage any of these service models. The difference is that modern app development is a methodology that focuses on how applications are developed, emphasizes agile, scalable and flexible development practices. Modern app development can be integrated into IaaS or PaaS to provide the infrastructure and platform services needed to develop, extend and scale applications.

Cloud-native databases offer quick deployment, remote accessibility and on-demand scalability, unlike traditional on-premises databases. They eliminate hardware setup and can be operational in minutes and adapt to varying loads, ensuring consistent performance. This architecture significantly eases scaling, cost management and resilience, aligning with cloud-native automated provisioning and management principles.

One way to take this further is with a purpose-built cloud-native database. A purpose-built database is one that is developed for the specific workloads and requirements of your application. This enables your application to be faster and makes it easier to build more resilient and scalable applications more cost-effectively.

Unlike traditional perimeter-based security models, cloud security adopts a data-centric approach, focusing on encryption and multi-factor authentication. It leverages automation and AI-driven defenses for enhanced protection and flexibility, allowing on-demand scalability. Cloud environments also offer robust security features, underpinning the modern approach to application modernization services.

CI/CD in the cloud delivers more automation, scalability and accessibility than traditional setups. Cloud-based CI/CD pipelines leverage cloud resources, enabling faster iterations and instant scalability based on workload demands. They offer a variety of tools and services for seamless integration and deployment, all this alongside better monitoring and logging capabilities. This facilitates a more efficient, agile development environment and performance optimization, which are central tenets of cloud-native development.

Building applications on AWS differs from Azure or GCP due to a few unique aspects, including:

• Service Range: AWS offers a wide array of services, which is more extensive than those offered by Azure or GCP, allowing developers a bigger sandbox to work in for cloud application development.
• Maturity: AWS offers more mature and robust services and infrastructure, supporting the creation of scalable applications.
• Community and Support: AWS has a large community and a broad range of support resources, which can be beneficial, especially when developers encounter issues.
• Consistent Price Reductions: Services become less expensive over time, allowing greater scale and agility.
• Developer Tools: The developer tooling may vary across AWS, Azure and GCP, which can influence the ease of application development. Because AWS has a robust toolset, application development is easier.
• Global Availability: AWS has a vast global infrastructure, ensuring lower latency and better performance globally.
• Security Protocols: AWS has put strong safeguards in place to enhance its security and add an extra layer of privacy protection.