Today's technology consumers demand always-on, real-time software solutions that are able to scale to rapidly changing loads. Companies demand deep insights into their customers to drive business decisions and predict market changes. Creative start-ups regularly disrupt long-standing industry leaders due to their ability to quickly innovate and bring new technology solutions to established problems.

The public cloud is a proven model for driving innovation. By lowering the turnaround for operations such as provisioning virtual machines or configuring networks, teams are able to spend less time waiting and more time solving business problems. By providing powerful and flexible permission systems, public clouds offer customers the ability to adopt self-service models for many operational tasks, further lowering the barrier for developers to get the ball rolling. By centralizing top talent across operations and security, public clouds are able to provide an extreme level of robustness and security in their products.

Perhaps the strongest motivator for many companies considering the public cloud is the rather large potential to reduce operational and infrastructure costs. By taking in the cost of building and managing data center, companies such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are able to achieve massive economies of scale. These economies of scale allow public clouds to outperform most private cloud solutions in terms of compute costs, storage, and infrastructure management costs—a benefit they then pass on to customers. Although many companies will fall somewhere between fully public cloud-based solutions and on-premise solutions (often called hybrid clouds), most businesses stand to gain significant savings by leveraging some level of public cloud services.

For a developer, public clouds offer many new and exciting ways to bring applications to your end users. In the simplest terms, this is achieved by abstracting away major components of application management that are not your direct concern. If your goal is to provide an API, your primary concern is likely building and running a collection of web services, not provisioning and maintaining the servers to host these services. If your application needs to persist user data, your primary concern is likely building out a well-tested data persistence layer backed by a reliable database, not managing the hard drives on which your data is persisted. Public clouds offer developers the ability to dedicate more time to solving the actual problems at hand by leveraging managed services.

In addition to these abstractions, public clouds offer a large number of solutions for supporting running applications. Common solutions include logging services, along with metric aggregation, tracing, and introspection services for application insights. Likewise, monitoring and alerting services are considered core functionality, and are usually deeply integrated with both logging services and the underlying application management platforms to provide a cohesive ecosystem for supporting robust cloud-native applications.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics: