As business environment is constantly changing to enable complex business processes that need to be optimized, software has to continuously adapt to these changes to the application rapidly that are defect free, reliable and scalable to support these business processes. Agile processes of development have become the new de-facto standard as the optimum methodology within the software development life cycle (SDLC). With incremental progress being the measure of software growth and flexibility within the software becoming more paramount (for enabling complex business processes), scrum methodology of defining sprints has become the solution to achieve both the technical and business goals in parallel.

With the advent of agile, scrum and sprints the duration of software updates has significantly reduced and need to constantly release new features incrementally has become the norm. Cloud has enabled to effectively help engineering teams as well as individual developers and business leaders to reduce their initial capital needs for the development of these new software or features by primarily two significant impacts, the first being ability to provide individual development/test environment for each developer/engineer and second predefined frameworks and platforms that have effective web services based solutions for data storage (not using relational databases), messaging, queuing and monitoring services.

Key benefits of cloud based environments for development

• Instant availability of development environments. Provides significant cost reduction.
• Faster prototyping with reduced effort in development time using web services for common tasks.
• Increased reliability and monitoring of servers be it development or production.
• Enabling auto-scaling on-demand without intervention thus only paying for what is used.
• Sharing of common servers across multiple distributed teams – in some cases even across continents.
• Avoids long-term commitments, postpones or saves costs and preserves all options (to ramp up or down).

SNS has developed expertise with well-known cloud solutions not limiting to Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, Azure, Force.com, etc. These different cloud solutions solve problems that are at different levels of the need of the software application or business service be it a social network, image processing, data analytics, etc.

SNS uses and leverages open-source technologies based on the requirement and limitations of the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), a common terminology for the above listed cloud environments.