10 First-Timer Tips for Successful Application Development in Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a transformative power that’s fueling over 60% of business data. It has especially gained speed in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, growing at a predicted CAGR of 15%.

For starters, the tech is aligned to the Kingdom’s digital transformation goals outlined in Vision 2030. As businesses and government entities shift toward modernization, cloud services offer the scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency needed to support innovation and rapid growth.

With cloud computing quickly positioning itself as a cornerstone of KSA’s digital future, you can’t lag behind. And if application development in cloud computing is on your to-do list, you NEED to keep the following tips in mind.

💡 Unsure about native application development for cloud? If you’re still hesitating to contact cloud native app development services, chances are that your business is missing out on operational agility, higher reliability, and much more. And you may not necessarily need to invest too much if your business is ready to embrace this innovative technology.

1) Start with a “Cloud-Native” Mindset, Not Just “Cloud-Hosted”

Don’t just lift and shift your traditional app to the cloud.

Cloud-native applications are designed to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity, scalability, and resilience.

And unlike traditional monolithic apps that are simply hosted on cloud servers, they’re purposely built for dynamic environments. That’s why they’re made of loosely coupled microservices, often deployed in containers, and managed using platforms like Kubernetes.

This architecture allows these apps to scale according to demand, recover quickly from failures, and roll out updates with minimal downtime.

And it’s these traits that you’ll need to innovate faster, reduce infrastructure overhead, and deliver a more consistent experience to users.

So, make sure to develop accordingly.

2) Choose Your Cloud Region Wisely

Cloud regions are the geographic locations where cloud providers host their data centers. Each region typically consists of multiple zones to ensure high availability and fault tolerance.

Thing is not all regions are created equal. That’s why your choice will directly impact performance (latency), availability, compliance, and even pricing.

While your application development in cloud computing partner may have some suggestions, here are some points to remember.

• Select a region that’s geographically close to your primary user base to minimize latency and ensure faster response times.
• Verify that the services you need are available in your chosen region. Unfortunately, many advanced or newer offerings may be limited to some regions.
• Ensure the region complies with local data residency and privacy laws. This step is especially important if your industry or location has strict regulatory requirements.
• Consider redundancy and disaster recovery needs. For that, evaluate whether your preferred region supports multiple availability zones or if a multi-region setup is needed.
• Assess network performance. This is a must if your application involves real-time communication or cross-region data syncing.
• Align your region choice with your long-term business goals. Especially if you’re planning to expand into new markets.

3) Plan for All the Costs of Cloud Application Development

In addition to what you may see in your contract, cloud apps come with several costs.

Yes, application development in cloud computing offers significant savings and flexibility. However, unexpected costs can creep in quickly if you don’t plan thoroughly.

Here are all the major and hidden costs you should expect:

• Compute Costs
• Storage Costs
• Data Transfer and Network Costs
• Development and Tooling
• Managed Services and Databases
• Security and Compliance
• Licensing and Support
• Overprovisioned Resources (e.g. underused VMs and databases)
• Idle Environments
• Zombie Assets (e.g., forgotten storage volumes and unused IPs)
• Data Retrieval from Archival Storage

In addition to these, you may incur penalties for exceeding your designated quota or SLA breaches. So, discuss everything beforehand to avoid any surprises.

4) Don’t Over-Optimize for Scale Early in Cloud Based Application Development

Don’t let your enthusiasm to develop cloud apps drive you to prematurely design for massive scale. Especially if you don’t have real users for it.

Sure, it’s tempting to build big. But this mindset can lead to complex architectures. Jumping into aspects such as microservices and container orchestration early on can become a pain later.

Without the operational maturity or real-world traffic to support these choices, you’ll end up with too many moving parts, difficult debugging and testing, and higher costs due to idle or redundant resources.

Instead, take advantage of pay-as-you-go cloud resources. Getting resources when needed means you don’t need to pre-purchase capacity for hypothetical traffic spikes. And you can use auto-scaling, serverless functions, and load balancers to handle growth organically.

You should also focus your initial efforts of product-market fit and reliability. This entails ensuring fast iterations and deployment, managing tight feedback loops from real users, and monitoring for stability in addition to performance.

Now you must be wondering when you should consider scaling your application development in cloud computing. The simplest answer is: when it hurts, and only then.

You should optimize for scale when you see signs of stress like increased latency under high load or resource exhaustion warnings. And of course, when your user base expands or your business begins expanding to new markets.

5) Use Feature Flags for Faster and Safer Deployments

Once your cloud apps become a hit, you’ll need to add more features. However, releasing them should be a strategic step rather than a quick one. And that’s why you should talk to your tech partner about feature flags.

Also known as feature toggles, these are bits of code that allow you to turn specific features on or off without redeploying an app.

As a result, you can reduce deployment risk. After all, you won’t have to coordinate big release windows or worry about hotfix rollbacks. If something goes wrong, you can switch off the updates and investigate the issues without users being any wiser.

You should especially discuss having feature toggles if your cloud app is an eCommerce site, a SaaS platform, or an enterprise app.

Cloud based eCommerce benefits from flags in several ways, including launching promotions to select regions or testing new checkout flows. Meanwhile, adding feature flags to a SaaS platform allows you to roll out beta features to premium users only. As for enterprise apps, you can have developers create role-based feature flags to gate admin functionality.

💡 You can use feature flags to unlock data-driven product decisions too. Rolling out features gradually allows you to A/B test new ideas, measure user engagement, and gather real-world feedback. This enables business teams to validate value early, pivot faster, and align product roadmaps with actual customer behavior.

6) Always Start with Automated Backups and Monitoring

When building in the cloud, it’s easy to get caught up in feature delivery and forget the basics. However, if it’s not backed up, it’s not safe.

Unfortunately, there’s always a small percentage of risk arising from a crash, data corruption, or accidental deletion. Even services as robust as Google Cloud are susceptible to error, such as the major outage in June 2025.

Keeping that in mind, you should establish automated backups to ensure that your data, configurations, and application states are recoverable.

Don’t rely on manual exports or ad hoc snapshots. Instead, set up scheduled backups for databases, storage volumes, and key application assets from day one.

Complement this with real-time monitoring. That way, you’ll get visibility into how your app is performing and where it’s breaking down.

And don’t worry. In addition to handling application development in cloud computing, your tech provider may track system metrics, errors, and performance bottlenecks. Just make sure to discuss this before signing your contract.

7) Simulate Failure Early with Chaos Testing Tools

It may sound scary having to prepare for failure, but you have to.

As Cloud environments are distributed and unpredictable, you simply can’t assume everything will work perfectly. So, assume the worst and start breaking things on purpose.

That’s where chaos engineering comes in.

Chaos engineering entails intentionally introducing failures into a system to test its resilience and uncover weaknesses before they cause real-world outages. For instance, you can simulate high CPU or memory loads or disconnect a database.

Doing this prepares your system as well as your team for real-world disruptions. It further uncovers weak links like single points of failure, inefficient logic, and bottlenecks under stress.

This, in turn, ensures reduced downtime while boosting confidence in your system’s stability.

8) Track Every External Dependency in Application Development Cloud Computing

Payment gateways, authentication providers, and analytics platforms are just some of the many external services your cloud apps need. And each one of these is a potential point of failure.

If these dependencies experience temporary downtime, your app will pay the price. After all, they’re tightly woven into your user experience. So, your app may slow down, throw errors, or even crash entirely.

And without proper handling, a single point of external failure can ripple across your entire system. This can damage performance, user trust, and your bottom line.

To avoid these dire consequences, ensure your application development in cloud computing partner at least offers:

• Logging and monitoring all external calls
• Setting timeouts, retries, and fallback logic
• Configuring alerts for when dependencies fail or slow down
• Maintaining a list of critical third-party APIs and their SLAs

With these, dependencies will be treated like shared infrastructure. And that’s the right way to go around them.

9) Audit Permissions Early and Often

Security misconfigurations are a leading cause of cloud breaches. This is especially true for apps using cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM).

You see, most development teams start with overly broad permissions, granting admin access for everyone just to get things running. But that approach creates long-term risk.

When too many users or services have unrestricted access, it becomes far easier for accidental changes to break production systems.

Moreover, internal threats or compromised credentials can cause large-scale damage. Similarly, audit trails can become meaningless while security compliance violations go unnoticed.

What you should enforce is the principle of least privilege. Based on this, each user, service, or role gets only the permissions it needs to function.

Moreover, you’ll need to audit IAM policies regularly, especially when –

• Onboarding or offboarding team members
• Changing architecture or infrastructure
• Adding new cloud services

Considering that most cloud providers offer tools to help, make sure to use them.

💡 Even if you have a reliable cloud app developer, you should do your due diligence when it comes to risks. There are several issues that can compromise application security in cloud computing, such as insecure APIs, data oversharing, and shadow IT. So, it’s critical that you implement a security-first mindset from the very beginning to avoid costly breaches and compliance issues later.

10) Plan for Observability, Not Just Logging

Even if you’re new to application development in cloud computing, you’ve probably heard about the importance of logging.

Logging in cloud computing is the capture, storage, and maintenance of detailed records of events and activities that occur within your cloud-based applications, services, and infrastructure. For instance, your logs can include user activity and application behaviors.

While highly useful, this process isn’t enough. You need observability.

Observability is the ability to understand what’s happening inside your cloud-based systems in real time.

To simplify this further, logging captures individual events or messages like errors, warnings, or user actions. Meanwhile, the broader observability combines logs, metrics, and traces to give a full picture of why things happened.

So, together they help you detect issues faster, troubleshoot more effectively, and understand complex app behavior. And this is something you should build from day one since it’s much harder to retrofit later.

Let Us Help You with Your Cloud Based App Development Needs

Whether you’re building from scratch, migrating to the cloud, or optimizing an existing system, trust DPL to guide you every step of the way.

From strategy and architecture to deployment and security, our cloud application development services ensure performance, resilience, and growth. And the best part? We’re conveniently located in Riyadh, the tech hub of the Kingdom.

Contact us via the form below, and let’s get your app deployed to the cloud.