Why Should You Bother?

Scaling Success with Flexibility Imagine you’re a software developer working on an e-commerce platform. During a major sale event, your application experiences a surge in traffic as customers rush to make purchases. Without cloud infrastructure, you would be limited by the server capacity you initially set up. If the traffic exceeds expectations, the website could crash, leading to lost sales and frustrated customers.

Now, enter the cloud. With cloud services, you can dynamically scale your resources based on demand. During the sale, the system can automatically allocate additional server power to handle the increased load. This elasticity ensures your application remains responsive and available, avoiding potential revenue loss. For product managers, understanding this flexibility means being able to promise a seamless customer experience during peak times, enhancing the product’s reliability and customer satisfaction.

As a product manager, you’re tasked with launching a new feature for your software product. Traditionally, this might involve a lengthy process of procuring and configuring physical servers. However, in the cloud era, developers can leverage Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision resources instantly.

With cloud services, developers can rapidly prototype and test new features without the constraints of physical infrastructure. Product managers benefit from accelerated development cycles, allowing them to bring innovative features to the market faster. Additionally, cloud platforms often offer a variety of pre-built services, like databases and machine learning tools, enabling developers to integrate advanced functionalities without starting from scratch. Understanding the cloud’s advantages allows product managers to make informed decisions about feature timelines, resource allocation, and ultimately, the product’s time-to-market.

In both scenarios, a solid grasp of cloud technologies empowers software developers and product managers to navigate challenges, optimize performance, and drive innovation in their respective roles. If you’d like to learn more about cloud technologies, we recommend Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies (LFS151x), free to audit on edX.