Most developers spend about 60% of their time building and the rest of their time learning. Often the research is proactive, due to personal interest or a desire to ensure skills are up to date. I am in this camp . At other times it is borne of sheer necessity. You learn what is vital to tackling your next big project. I am also in this camp (no one says you have to choose ). In the past new projects assumed a hosted or on premise approach. The project manager and system designer had to think about the essential requirements like scalability, availability and (of course) security. In the present we still need to deliver on these essentials but the app developers now need to do a lot more ( as always ). They need to span the globe, support millions of users, curate petabytes of data, glean insights and delight users in new ways. Enter the cloud . As observed previously , cloud services deliver built in scalability and availability. The best providers also provid