For cloud users, failure is an option

IT leader says cloud is great because it means he can try, fail and move on quickly

Advocates of cloud services are quick to point out that the speed of cloud deployment can result in rapid success, but a less cited but almost equally important feature of cloud services is that they will allow unfeasible ideas to fail quickly, meaning the company can move on.

This is according to Mark Laws, head of application support at publishers A&N Media, who spoke exclusively to Computing.

"The cloud allows you to innovate quickly, but also allows you to fail quickly. This means you can test out an idea rapidly, and if it doesn't work you haven't lost much time, but it will have been a learning experience."

He gave the example of a bespoke invoice approval application that was not performing as required at A&N Media.

Law had several theories as to why it wasn't performing, but needed to set up production, development and test environments in order to test them.

"This meant we had to prioritise the theories and execute them one by one to see which was at the root of the problem. We ended up rejecting about the first four theories with the last giving us the improvements we were looking for."

He explained that this was a lengthy process.

"To eliminate the four theories we had to test them linearly because we only had one test and development environment. We had to develop, change, implement and test and then revert to the baseline environment, which of course added to the time we took to get to a good place."

Laws explained that had he been able to use the cloud to quickly create these environments, it would have taken less time to arrive at the solution.

"If we had been using cloud services for development and test we could have fired up four or five instances of development and test, executed the theories in parallel, and got to that positive result more quickly."