The cost to develop web-based software has dropped an order of magnitude over the past 15 years. Part of it is due to the rise of open source software, part of it is due to cloud computing, and part of it is due to general advancements in software development. One area that’s been fascinating to watch is the rise of cloud-based software engineering tools to enhance communication, quality control, performance, and more.
Here’s an example set of cloud-based software engineering tools:
- GitHub – Source code management and version control system
- GitHub Issues – Issue tracker and milestone management system
- Codeship – Automate testing and product deployment
- Airbrake – Capture product errors as they occur
- Rigor – Monitor web application performance from real browsers in the cloud
- New Relic – Analyze product performance at the code level
- Amazon Web Services – Numerous products including application and database hosting
Building a quality application still takes expertise and time. Cloud-based software engineering tools greatly enhance the process.
What else? What are some other cloud-based software engineering tools that you use?
David Cummings on Startups 
MS Azure has been working pretty good fo us!
SendGrid and Mailchimp have made it very easy for startups to handle email delivery
nitrous.io
I like Atlassian’s (https://www.atlassian.com/) toolset. Allows for geographically diverse engineering teams to work and collaborate using the cloud for issue tracking, project management, source code control, code reviews. If you are trying to build a ROWE around a telecommuting team, these tools work great for supporting that.
I must say that I’m a fan of Google App Engine combined with GitHub. It was DEAD SIMPLE to get my PHP server up and running (with no maintenance or upgrades needed to be performed by myself). I then linked my project up with my repository on GitHub. Now all I have to do is make/test code changes, commit and push to master, and Google App Engine deploys to production for me!
I have an interesting followup to @justiss4all ‘s comment. I looked into Nitrous. First of all, it seems really cool. I was able to deploy some toy apps literally within minutes of signing up for a free VM. But after taking a deeper look I was concerned about some of their TOS verbiage.
http://help.nitrous.io/admin-terms/
8.1 … by creating an Application through use of the Nitrous Services, you give Nitrous a worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such Application for the sole purpose of enabling Nitrous to provide you with the Nitrous Services.
So using Nitrous they can yank your IP from you.
So….maybe this is a future blog post from @davidcummings but how much effort do you put into researching your services providers and protecting your IP?