Challenges of Cloud Application Development and How to Overcome Them

Cloud application development enables organizations to create scalable and cost-effective solutions that adapt to varying workloads. But, developing on hyperscalers and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms can be challenging—you need to manage various infrastructure components (like networking, storage, and compute resources), which often makes scaling, security, and optimizing costs difficult. At Render, we have years of experience with cloud application development, helping organizations build scalable, cost-effective solutions that adapt to dynamic workloads. Render's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering abstracts away many of the complexities of the underlying infrastructure so organizations can develop their products without worrying about minute details of the infrastructure or investing resources in a team of experts. In this article, we'll share common challenges of cloud development and strategies to overcome them. You'll learn:

• Best practices for ensuring cloud security
• Effective approaches to managing scalability and performance
• Techniques for optimizing cloud costs

…and more! Let's dive right in.

Cloud application development challenges and solutions

Cloud development can be tricky—you have to ensure cloud security, manage scalability and performance, and ensure data availability and backup—all while keeping costs in check. Let's break down each of these challenges.

Ensuring cloud security

The primary concern of a cloud application is its security. Because the application lives on the cloud, you must ensure your team members have proper access to it. But at the same time, you need to be vigilant about stopping unauthorized access. A typical cloud application has various components that need different levels of access and security configurations. For example, an application stack might look like this:

• Backend API: Can be accessed by any authenticated user. You must implement strict authentication and rate limiting to prevent unauthorized access.
• Storage bucket: Read-only access by anyone for public data. For private data, only the owner has full access.
• Database: This can only be accessed by the backend API.
• Source code of the app: Only developers have access.

Compliance is another issue. Organizations must ensure their applications adhere to various region-specific legal frameworks, such as GDPR in the EU or CCPA in California, in addition to field-specific regulations such as HIPAA for healthcare-related applications or PCI DSS for payment processors. Failure to comply with these legal regulations can lead to severe financial loss and a sharp decline in customer trust. IaaS environments offer a robust security system that grants you fine-grained control over the security of your application, but it's complex. If you're not careful, you might leave the application and its data exposed to malicious actors. IaaS environments often need a combination of IAM policies, network policies, and firewall rules. IAM misconfigurations, such as overly permissive roles, can allow unauthorized access to sensitive infrastructure. Misconfiguration of a storage bucket can leave sensitive data accessible to the public. In 2022, a misconfigured S3 bucket leaked about 1.5 million files that included airline employees' ID cards with photos, full names, occupations, and national ID numbers, as well as other photos of employees, planes, luggage, and more. Unit 42 researchers also found a data extortion campaign that relied on misconfigured AWS IAM credentials to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data.

Maintaining security with a PaaS

PaaS services like Render simplify security by handling most of the complex security measures for you. Render provides secure-by-default configurations, including private networks for internal communication that are isolated from the public internet. Services, databases, and background workers communicate using unique internal hostnames. With a built-in RBAC system, each team member gets a role that defines the level of access they receive. You also get a detailed audit log for compliance purposes.

Managing scalability and performance

Scalability is one of the main selling points of a cloud environment. The ability to dynamically add more resources as the application usage goes up or remove excess resources when usage goes down—with little to no downtime—distinguishes cloud services from on-premise servers, where modifying the existing architecture is a complex and time-consuming task. Most IaaS systems offer different approaches to scalability. In the simplest scenario, where your application runs on a single compute instance, you can adjust the available resources, such as CPU cores, RAM, and storage size. However, this approach results in downtime while the compute instance is being modified. If your application runs on multiple compute instances, you can add or remove instances as you need without any downtime. But this setup requires load balancers to evenly distribute workloads. It's also difficult to predict traffic volume. Traffic surges, whether due to promotional campaigns, seasonal events, or unpredictable user behavior, can overwhelm resources and degrade performance. If you provision more instances than you need, you'll incur a huge cost. It's not unheard of for developers to rack up an astronomical bill due to overprovisioned and unused resources. And underprovisioning resources may lead to degraded performance when traffic spikes. Many IaaS environments offer autoscaling features that scale the resources up or down based on the traffic, but configuring autoscaling groups and scaling policies is complicated and error-prone. You also need to set up monitoring to collect metrics related to resource usage that determine when autoscaling will occur. This process is still error-prone: An aggressive autoscaling policy will incur costs, but too simple of a policy might not be able to properly handle increased traffic.

Solving scalability and performance issues using PaaS

PaaS solutions simplify scalability by automating the autoscaling process based on predefined policies and real-time resource usage. Unlike an IaaS, where the user needs to manually manage the autoscaling policies, a PaaS abstracts away the complexity so the user has one less thing to worry about. Render gives you the ability to manually scale instances—or let Render automatically scale them for you based on custom targets you set for CPU and/or memory usage. Render also provides DDoS protection that prevents your services from mistaking a DDoS attack as legitimate traffic and scaling up in response. PaaS solutions also use various tactics to improve application performance, such as a global CDN to serve static content and a built-in caching layer to reduce database load. These tactics ensure your application can perform under load and autoscale only when necessary.

Managing cloud costs

Cost saving is one of the most touted features of cloud services. You don't have to worry about the cost of buying and maintaining hardware with an IaaS. However, as your application grows in complexity, it’s fairly common to start to incur unexpected expenses, and it can quickly become a financial black hole. As mentioned in a previous section, the biggest contributors to cloud costs are misconfigured and underutilized systems. It's easy to misconfigure a service without noticing and get caught by surprise when you're presented with a large bill. Fathom Analytics saves $5,774 USD per year simply by turning off versioning in its S3 bucket—a setting that is very easy to miss. IaaS systems offer facilities to prevent this scenario, such as usage monitoring, budgeting, and usage alerts, but to properly use them, you need experienced team members, which also comes at a price. Managing IaaS environments often requires hiring or building a dedicated platform engineering or DevOps team. And while this saves you money on cloud costs, you're now spending more on a team of experts. Moreover, as the application becomes more complex, your team will spend more time and resources configuring, optimizing, and maintaining the infrastructure. This includes tasks like setting up instances, configuring the security policies, setting up autoscaling, and observation. Ultimately, for complex applications with many users and unpredictable traffic, IaaS systems often end up costing more than on-premise setups.

Reducing cloud costs with PaaS

A PaaS solution eliminates the need for a dedicated platform engineering/DevOps team by offering preconfigured infrastructure. The PaaS handles the complexities of setting up, managing, and scaling the infrastructure so your developers can focus on writing and deploying code. PaaS systems can integrate with CI/CD tools to automatically deploy the application on code changes. They can create a preconfigured environment depending on the application's needs and set up observability and autoscaling to ensure the application runs smoothly. Render offers additional capabilities such as an IaC model, built-in security configurations, integrated CI/CD pipelines, automatic TLS certificate management, zero-downtime deployments, and DDoS protection. Most of these processes can be customized from a GUI, which is easy to learn and use. With a PaaS, you save on DevOps team costs, and possibly even cloud costs.

Ensuring data availability and backup

Data availability is essential for cloud applications, yet efforts to improve performance can create single points of failure. These critical components can disrupt the entire system if they fail. For instance, an app that has autoscaling to handle varying traffic might rely on a single database instance. If the database goes down, the whole application could stop functioning. Similarly, using a single storage bucket introduces risk, as accidental modification or deletion of data might result in significant data loss. Because data availability can be difficult to handle, it requires a lot of expertise. With IaaS systems, many choose to use redundant storage (such as multiple database servers or storage buckets), but this introduces new challenges, like data replication. You need to make sure all the instances hold the same data to prevent any inconsistent state. IaaS systems offer two approaches to data syncing: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous syncing updates all instances after every change, resulting in high resource usage, especially for high-volume apps. On the other hand, asynchronous syncing uses fewer resources but may still lead to an inconsistent state—for instance, if a database instance goes down before the syncing is complete. This redundant storage is often distributed across multiple availability zones to ensure data availability in case an availability zone goes down. Failover mechanisms are also often used to tackle availability issues. This includes promoting standby databases or rerouting traffic to alternate regions. Regular data backups can also help in times of mishap, as you can roll back to a backup option quickly. However, the setup is cumbersome, complicated, and requires experienced engineers, careful planning, time, and resource investment. Redundancy and backups are also costly as you have to pay for more resources.

Maintaining data availability with PaaS

PaaS platforms tackle data availability issues using built-in tools such as automatic backups and point-in-time recovery, which lets you roll back your database to any point in the past few days. Platforms like Render also provide a high availability feature that you can use to run two database instances in two geographically separate regions. If the primary database goes down, the secondary instance is automatically promoted to primary. All of this can be set up with just the click of a button, and you don't need a team of experts and countless hours of planning to get started.

Vendor lock-in and interoperability

A common issue with IaaS systems is their use of proprietary tools. These tools offer huge performance improvements and ease of use by integrating tightly with the rest of the IaaS ecosystem. However, these tools can result in vendor lock-in because they force you to stay within the IaaS ecosystem. Switching providers can be challenging, and the support you get depends entirely on the provider's services. For example, if you use AWS Lambda, you'll be tied to the AWS ecosystem, preventing you from moving to another provider without rewriting a major chunk of your app.

How to minimize vendor lock-in

To minimize vendor lock-in, developers should try to reduce reliance on proprietary services from the very beginning.

Minimize vendor lock-in at the code level

At the code level, developers can use open source frameworks and libraries to ensure portability. Many IaaS and PaaS systems support popular open source frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Laravel, and Django. Using these open source tools makes it easy for you to migrate to another provider if needed. Avoiding proprietary APIs and frameworks at the code level is equally important. For instance, using open source ORM libraries like SQLAlchemy allows applications to abstract database interactions, making it easier to switch between database systems without significant rewrites.

Use open source tools

Using open source tools like PostgreSQL and Redis ensures maximum interoperability since almost all IaaS and PaaS systems support them. Developers should avoid using custom extensions or features unique to a specific distribution of these technologies. For instance, sticking to standard SQL rather than relying on database-specific functions ensures that applications can transition between databases with minimal refactoring. Render's managed PostgreSQL and Redis services provide the benefits of open source while abstracting operational complexity. The PostgreSQL offering provides fully managed, encrypted databases with advanced features like point-in-time recovery, on-demand backups, and support for read replicas and high availability. Developers can use the most popular PostgreSQL extensions and easily configure connection pooling to optimize database performance. Render's Redis instances offer persistent storage with up to 10 GB of RAM, comprehensive metrics monitoring, and the ability to scale instance types, all with the press of a few buttons.

Use containerization

Containerization with tools like Docker or Podman is another portability strategy. Docker encapsulates an application and its dependencies into a lightweight image that runs the same across different hardware and OSs. Docker containers can be utilized in a container orchestration system such as Kubernetes, which is also open source and vendor-neutral. This setup provides you with a scalable and performant infrastructure without relying on any third-party tools, enabling smooth migrations and multicloud strategies. Render provides first-class support for Docker and makes containerization easy by automatically detecting Dockerfiles at the root of your repo. It suggests a Docker runtime for your app during service creation and enables deployment of prebuilt Docker images. Render can automatically build Docker images directly from Git repositories, and it provides advanced build optimizations like parallelized multistage builds and layer caching. Docker services support Render features like zero-downtime deployments, automatic HTTPS redirects, and the ability to run pre-deploy commands for tasks like database migrations. Render also supports private image registries and provides templates for installing popular open source applications.

Conclusion

While cloud application development is advertised to be easy and cheap, in reality, this isn't always the case. In a complicated setup, ensuring data safety and enabling scalability and data availability can be challenging, often resulting in wasted time and money. IaaS environments demand significant investment in terms of expertise and expenses and can result in a complicated infrastructure that is hard to navigate and hard to migrate away from. However, these challenges can be mitigated using a PaaS that abstracts away the complexities of managing the infrastructure and security considerations. Render enables developers to focus on building applications while addressing the complexities of cloud infrastructure management. Render lets you develop a secure, performant, and highly available app at just a fraction of the cost of a traditional cloud environment.