What are Some Cloud Development Tools?

Are you interested in knowing the top cloud development tools? In this article, we will provide a list of tools used by cloud developers for efficient cloud development. Let’s start.

Most Used Cloud Development Tools

As we have discussed in our other blog article on what cloud development is and how it is different from the traditional app development process, cloud development offers a more collaborative and seamless software development process. 

The cloud infrastructure is based on technologies like continuous integration / continuous development (CI/CD), microservices, containers, etc. Some common cloud developer tools include:

Kubernetes

Kubernetes or k8 is a cloud orchestration platform that allows cloud developers to deploy, maintain, and scale containerized applications. Developers can join together the host running container apps and Kubernetes helps to manage these clusters by automating most of the manual tasks involved.

The tool can be used on a private cloud, public cloud, or a hybrid cloud setup and is, therefore, suitable for efficiently building and managing cloud-native applications requiring real-time data streaming, etc.

The main advantage of Kubernetes for cloud developers is that it enables container-based application development. It automates operational tasks and lets you control updates and deployments, scale cloud resources while an application is deployed and running, manage services, orchestrate an app across multiple hosts, etc.

Microsoft Azure

It is a cloud computing platform with a range of services from computing resources, networking, storage, analytics, etc. Cloud developers can select and use these services to develop, manage, and scale new or existing applications in the cloud.

Microsoft Azure follows a pay-as-you-go model where users are charged an amount for the monthly use of selected cloud resources. 

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Azure supports several open-source technologies and third-party tools that allow businesses to reach their organizational goals with flexibility. 

The platform supports four cloud computing models including platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and serverless.

Microsoft Azure platform is mostly used to run containers or virtual machines in the cloud. It is also commonly used to host databases in the cloud. These include serverless relational databases such as Azure SQL and non-relational databases like NoSQL.

The Azure platform also allows users to meet their data retention needs through backup and disaster recovery using Azure storage.

Azure app service lets developers develop and deploy applications for mobile and web technologies through a fully-managed infrastructure. It is available as PaaS.

Microsoft Azure provides a number of other cloud services related to 

• Development and deployment of web applications with features for content delivery, push notifications, API management, reporting, etc.
• Development of mobile applications such as iOS and Android apps with the support of back-end tasks, building APIs, underlying operating system management, etc.
• Networking components such as virtual networks, dedicated gateways, etc, and services like traffic management, load balancing, network protection against attacks like DDoS, etc.
• Integration Services such as backup plan, site recovery, etc.
• Project collaboration tools like Azure DevOps with features like application diagnostics, etc.
• Sharing code and testing applications through software development kits (SDK). Azure supports a number of programming languages including Python, JavaScript, .Net, etc.

Read more on Azure cloud services here.

Node.js

Node.js is an open-source and cross-platform environment that runs JavaScript. Node.js follows asynchronous programming. It is used for non-blocking and event-driven servers due to its single-threaded nature. 

The underlying design is based on real-time and push-based architecture. This means that in contrast to the traditional web socket architecture of stateless web browsers’ design and stateless request-response paradigm, web applications can now have real-time two-way communication connections, where anyone can initiate communication and exchange data. 

Node.js helps cloud developers in building fast and scalable applications as it can handle a large number of simultaneous connections with high throughput. The single-threaded nature allows it to support a number of concurrent connections in an event loop.

Developers can use Node.js to create dynamic web pages; open, create, delete, and close server files; add, modify data on databases; etc.

Node.js comes with built-in support for node packet manager (NPM). NPM is a collection of publicly available development components. They can be installed from an online repository and comes with version control and dependency management.

The most commonly used NPM modules include:

• Express: A web development framework.
• Connect: An HTTP server framework providing several plugins, etc.
• MongoDB: A wrapper API for MongoDB object databases.
• Moment: A library for parsing, validating, and formatting date values.

You can find a complete list of NPM packaged modules on their website.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon Web Services platform provides several cloud computing products and services such as servers, remote computing, networking, mobile development, security, etc. The three main AWS products include EC2, a virtual machine service; Glacier, a low-cost cloud storage service; and S3, a storage service.

Cloud developers use these cloud development services to build scalable and adaptable applications while ensuring reliability and security using the latest technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Some of these popular services by the Amazon platform include:

• Continuous integration, allowing developers to continuously integrate and improve code using the DevOps model.
• Continuous delivery by allowing developers to automatically build and test software releases. It deploys all code changes to test and deployment environments after the build stage.
• Software Development Toolkits that enable developers to develop, deploy, and manage apps while working with AWS services natively from an editor or a command-line interface. Cloud SDK and command-line tools that help to release software faster while simplifying the software development process.
• Developer Communication, through the use of DevOps tools and automation software. These enable increased collaboration between developers, operations, and other teams like marketing, sales, etc. aligning everyone to the company’s goals and objectives.

AWS supports SDKs for many programming languages, including JavaScript, Python, PHP, .NET, Ruby, Java, etc.

AWS offers some IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) and IDE toolkits like Eclipse, AWS Cloud9, Pycharm, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, etc. Developers can use a code editor of their choice to write app code efficiently.

Google Cloud Platform

Google Cloud Platform allows developers to build, test, and deploy applications in various programming languages and on different development platforms such as Kubernetes, Firebase, etc.

Tools like Google App Engine, Cloud Monitoring, etc. help to manage code between software development teams. Moreover, it integrates GitHub and BitBucket code repositories to help developers easily access code for refactoring, searching, testing, etc.

Cloud Audit Logs help to track the change in source code involving the place and time of the changes done.

Cloud Deployment Manager enables cloud developers to define and deploy cloud infrastructure resources using code. 

Jenkins

It is an open-source continuous integration / continuous delivery software. Jenkins helps cloud developers build CI/CD pipelines and automate the delivery and deployment procedures for cloud apps. The automation software allows software developers to reliably develop, test, and deploy applications.

It is a server-based application that runs on a web server like Apache Tomcat. Jenkins automates the repeated tasks that often arise in the software development process, for example, running continuous test routines while developers are coding software. 

This practice of automated testing helps developers to detect application code errors early in the development stage and improve code quality.

Interested in Cloud Development?

Are you planning to invest in a cloud development approach? It is a viable business decision given the flexibility and reliability cloud-based services add to the software development procedures.

However, as mentioned in this article, cloud development requires the use of specific cloud platforms, cloud tools, and technologies. To accomplish cloud development, you must have software developers with a cloud development skillset.

If you, as a CTO, feel that you do not have the required cloud development skills in your project development team, we would advise you to partner with a reputed software development company.

DevTeam.Space can also help you here with its expert software developer community. You can write to us your initial cloud development specifications via this form and one of our technical managers will get back to you to further discuss your technical needs, project plan, etc.

Frequently Asked Questions on Cloud Development Tools