Economic incentives of the cloud While we continually talk about innovation and differen- tiation, costs considerations are top of mind with busi- ness management. This is especially true as businesses rely even more on IT to help them differentiate their business and offer a competitive advantage. IT continues to be called upon to “do more with less” in order to build the applications a business requires and to maintain and enhance assets already in products to offer a competitive advantage. Keeping these “development- focused” IT costs in control requires new, more efficient ways to develop applications, modernize existing appli- cations, and manage the environment to ensure high availability and performance. The potentially higher complexity resulting from a more modular, distributed deployment approach, and rapid changes in market and competitive conditions to which developers must re- spond, requires new methodologies and tools to support development efforts. But costs go beyond how develop- ers do their jobs. Many companies, facing the need to ex- pand their IT presence with more systems, storage, and other assets, may quickly find their costs can outstrip their budget. One way to cut costs is to adopt affordable public cloud services that make it possible to implement changes quickly and scale up and down depending on a business’ changing needs. Achieving enterprise agility The new generation of agile application development and deployment means software services can be developed and deployed virtually anywhere. Microservices enable 15