The Benefits of Environment as a Service (EaaS) for Any Software Business

As we’ve previously illustrated in our What is EaaS article, Environment as a Service has the application and its environment version controlled and managed as a single entity. A few immediate benefits of this approach are lowered costs, increased speed, and experimentation possibilities.

In this article, we’ll go more in-depth into the benefits of Environment as a Service, explain each one, and reveal how Bunnyshell can help.

Product deliverables that meet or exceed your key metrics while not compromising the application’s stability are the only method you should use to measure speed (velocity). An EaaS solution can improve velocity more than any other platform implementation.Therefore, using a fast and capable EaaS can improve development speed by at least two dimensions by removing rework and decreasing bottlenecks.

Infrastructure changes are costly in time across the board. Not to mention that these changes are difficult too. Where there aren’t ephemeral environments, there is an overall slowdown in developer velocity. This is because the DevOps team must update the shared staging environments to test changes and new infrastructure. In contrast, with ephemeral environments, testing is done in isolation without interfering with another developer’s work or environments.

Ultimately, these experimentation possibilities allow for higher velocity by minimizing rework and bottlenecks on shared resources. A developer can add services, environment variables, new infrastructure dependencies, and new datasets and databases through environment templates.

Applications have evolved, and a shift in architecture occurred, making it even more closely intertwined with development. And with DevOps teams becoming the most critical component in software development, developers have new requirements that are evolving alongside the applications and architectures. Instead of only focusing on their code, developers need to know how their code relates to the infrastructure that supports the application.

Add to these new requirements and a shortage of DevOps talent, and you may find your business needs lacking over time with issues around bandwidth, otherwise costly and time-consuming environment creation, and not only.

The solution: EaaS. Automated creation of environments with code commits that live in isolation and provide visibility at every stage of the process. This way, productivity increases without hiring additional people or sacrificing resources.

Rework is the most costly kind of work a developer can do. You can’t avoid it completely, unfortunately, but you can minimize its impact. Even the smallest features are complex and need to be checked by multiple teams before release to avoid rework and starting from scratch.

But an isolated, ephemeral environment allows each team to conduct tests early on and give feedback while the developers and designers create it. Therefore, a good EaaS solution removes bottlenecks and gives you confidence in your quality.

Education and training can’t expand without utilizing the flexibility of the cloud. With the help of an Environment as a Service platform, you can create app environments for product demos more easily than before. Onboarding and training business partners and stakeholders have never been easier.

It will only take you minutes (instead of 4 to 6 hours) to onboard someone to use this system and set up an environment - talk about significant time and cost savings.

A lower-cost is an essential factor when it comes to adopting an EaaS solution. First and foremost, you have a cost-effective environment implementation. EaaS allows you to limit the number of environments created and what they consist of, giving you full autonomy over your cloud bill.

Additionally, your environments are ephemeral, so they can either be spun up or deleted automatically for as long as you’re going to use them. And since EaaS is a scalable model, your environments can be scaled to match your needs and keep costs under control.

It’s also crucial to note that building your own environment is extremely costly and time-consuming. Depending on the complexity, DevOps teams can work on such a project for up to 18+ months, which can cost you over half a million dollars, not taking into account maintenance or upgrading costs from that point on. By choosing an EaaS solution, your app environment will be usable sooner than if you were to build it yourself, and the process will be more affordable.

So here are the most notable benefits of EaaS: reduced costs, maximized uptime, minimized rework, faster development speed, and higher reliability when deploying application environments. Are you ready to take advantage of these benefits?

Bunnyshell is an Environment as a Service platform that can help you cut downtime and deliver reliable applications and services at high velocity. We are the better alternative to developing your own testing environment to help your DevOps team save time and money and improve product quality.