Video: Phone developers should use the cloud

When you think about the monetization (awful word!) of apps for the phone, you can narrow it down to either:

The app is free – it was fun building it, I don’t want to be rich.

The app is paid for and entirely standalone. It doesn’t rely on any service that is firmly rooted in terra firma.

The app is free, but you pay for the service that is delivered through the app.

There are a few others which are basically combinations of the above. It’s the last one, and its variants, that probably scares a lot of phone developers off because it' has more to do with running a service and the phone app is probably the smallest part of the whole thing. Running a service means service management: making sure it’s still running, capacity planning, scaling, and obvious bread-and-butter jobs like patching, service packs, security fixes and so on.

Although the responsibility of continuing to provide a service to customers of your app still rests with you in these scenarios, PaaS cloud operators truly take away almost all of the time-consuming, headache-inducing part of running a reliable, scalable, available service.

I’ve made a video to describe the benefits and the approach to how a phone developer can deliver services which run in massively scalable, multi-million-dollar cloud-computing-datacentres and test out their ideas for just a few pence, or in many cases, using free cloud service trial subscriptions – meaning the only risk they endure is the time they spend developing the service.

Have fun

Planky – GBR-257

Cross-posted to the UKMSDN Blog.