Application development on the cloud is quite different from application development involving a single server. The biggest advantage of having the application on the cloud is horizontal scalability at low cost. The other advantages include dynamically getting new resources without a big upfront cost and paying for only the resources you use and not for the idle time. In the traditional programming paradigm, your resources are finite and to do more computations you have to buy extra CPUs and storage that might be idle most of the other times.
Cloud computing gives you an opportunity to mix different servers and utilize them on the fly in your API calls. Applications on the cloud need to be able to use multiple CPUs on demand and be able to handle robustly, the down times of any CPU. Google search, for instance, dynamically uses millions of CPUs to serve the user's queries and doesn't fail to return the result if one or more of the CPUs in the cluster fail. We would help you with similar cloud scaling with concepts like MapReduce. At SparkMyCloud, we have gotten a development team that understands the ways to best utilize the cloud computing powers and will help you build scalable applications in languages such as Perl, Python and PHP.
Developing apps on the cloud requires a different way of thinking about the CPUs, the software stack, and the infrastructure. You need to think about the optimum utilization of your processor and storage infrastructure to give you the best return on investment. Also, given that the CPUs might be spread around the transaction costs of passing data around has to be thought out. You need to ponder the best way to utilize the bandwidth and other resources while not being able to control directly, all the infrastructure.
We have evolved several agile methods to implement the application development on the cloud. These methods will take care of activities such as collecting user data, processing them etc and translates them into jobs that could then be taken care of by the next available CPU. We abstract the whole cluster of CPUs to appear like one CPU, with a giant operating system, that would make the front-end development much easier and quicker.
Apart from dynamic utilization of resources we must also think about the maintenance and patching in a different way. Here, we don't have just one or two CPUs that are running our code. We will be constantly bring in new resources and taking out the spent ones. The change of infrastructure should not affect the front end at all, and all this requires more thought and planning.
We can help you plan and design the whole application with the cloud in mind and help you scale your application in a big way. Hoping to see you as our customer for cloud application development.