Setting Up to Do Work Is Not Helpful

If you have not done development, engineering, or systems administration work before, one of the worst parts is all of the setup you have to do before you can actually do whatever thing it is you really want to do. Before you can run any software to do a thing, you need a server. That server has to be connected to a network. That network has to connect to the wider public Internet, and you have to be able to connect to the physical server through the network.

But before you can connect to the server and login, you have to install an operating system. After you install the operating system, you have to setup user accounts, networking configuration within the operating system, and any other configuration the operating system itself needs.

Then you have to install any software your workload needs. That software then has to be configured and setup on its own. Depending on what software you need, this configuration can be a significant amount of work in itself and require expert assistance.

After all these things, you still have to copy all of your code and anything else your workload needs to run onto the server. You probably still have to do more configuration to make the workload run in the new environment.

Finally, assuming all of these steps are successful without any issues, you can run your workload and do the work you need to do. It is not uncommon to have to go back and fix some error or issue in one of the many preceding steps, however.

This is an extreme example and simplification, of course, but this is a reasonably true reflection of every step that you could go through to get setup to do some work before you even get to do that work. It is a ton of work that is not whatever it is you actually need to do, and doing this work does not make you better at doing the work you need to do in most cases.

There are tools and technologies that help remove one or more of these steps as well. Of those tools, the cloud is perhaps one of the most powerful for relieving you of the burden of non-work work that you have to do before you can do your actual work.

The Cloud Makes Things Easy

When you can use the cloud, you can skip almost all of the setup steps in the preceding section when deploying your workloads. First off, you do not have to worry about setting up any physical hardware. That is usually taken care of for you. You often can also get operating systems and other supporting software pre-installed and pre-configured for you. Some cloud platforms even provide supporting software, like databases, as a service you can utilize without any configuration or setup.

With cloud platforms, you can provision the resources you need and move straight to setting up your code. Plus, once you have everything setup, you can use the resources for as long as you need and then return them. Most cloud platforms also have tools you can use to automate further to save the time you would otherwise have to spend on work that is not your actual work.

The Cloud Is Truly a Great Thing for Developers and Engineers

Thanks to the cloud, IT workers can generally do their jobs more quickly and efficiently than they could before. They can deploy their workloads and code faster, they can often access resources without having to wait for someone to physically put hands on hardware, and they can focus on the work that they actually need to do.

Cloud technologies have seen tremendous growth and development. More and more individuals, teams, and companies are adopting cloud technologies to streamline how they do business and to focus in on their actual lines of work. You can definitely look for more teams and workloads to move into the cloud from traditional non-cloudy systems.