Nowadays more and more of software development projects are based not on traditional on-premises infrastructure but on the public cloud. Other projects are still under consideration, to move or not to move. Let me briefly summarize the impact on the management aspects of such projects, that I see as the most crucial.
First of all, if you develop the cloud-native software (not just moving your existing software to the cloud), the public cloud means your team can leverage the cutting edge industry approaches and solutions in a standardized, not home-brewed way.
What does this mean? Well, this means that a lot of sophisticated options regarding the information storage, access, manipulation are available for your development team in a way your CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) exposed such functionality, with all the abstraction helping to leverage it. This for example means when you use PaaS-level services of your CSP you can easily leverage such non-trivial things as DR (Disaster Recovery), FT (Fault Tolerance), security and so on just as attributes of your whole product/solution.
Of course it is still required to have design/plan/prototype activities in the project plan, but the risks you need to manage here are typically less lower. So some of the technical risks are being mitigated for you in fact.
One more big point is the infrastructure agility level: you need to manage the infrastructure provisioning for different stages/environments of your project, depending on the project phase. At the beginning of the project your team will mostly need prototyping environments to prove the concept of solution. Later during development you will need integration and testing environments to support your testing activities. Finally you will need UAT (User Acceptance Testing), staging and production environments.
Typically provisioning of these environments should be there in the project plan too, for traditional projects the duration of such provisioning activities can be really significant (days, etc.); in case of the cloud this can be from minutes to hours and often automated. Much easier to manage/track as you as a manager can see (and even initiate) it all yourself through the CSP’s self-service portal.
If you and your team are using Agile development practices, then I think cloud has one more thing that really helps – the ease of regular demos for the stakeholders. Public cloud is an ideal platform for all possible access possibilities (thanks to the “Broad network access” essential feature of any cloud), this external infrastructure will help your team and stakeholders to have a common playground.
On the other hand, there is also an implication of public cloud from the fact that CSP is an external organization. You need to manage the communication with CSP support from the very beginning of the project. You have to mitigate the risks of CSP link downtime, as this becomes a critical project resource. To see some deeper analysis of cloud-related risks, please read my other post “Risk Identification in Cloud-based Software Development Projects”.
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