7 Questions to Ask Cloud Application Development Services Before Hiring Them

If you haven’t taken your apps to the cloud, you’re putting a lot at risk. In addition to increased data vulnerability, your organization may be burdened by higher infrastructure costs, reduced agility, and difficulty adopting innovative tech such as automation.

But in order to avoid all these risks, you should choose the right cloud application development services. After all, they’ll be your partners for the next few years, ensuring your app’s success.

When choosing a partner for cloud application development, the right questions can help you understand their expertise, process, and philosophy. And the seven you’re about to learn showcase what to look for in a reliable cloud development provider.

💡 For first-time cloud app development, invest time in understanding the basics. Understand everything there is to cloud models, scalability, and cost structures. A strong foundation helps you make smarter decisions, avoid surprises, and communicate effectively with your development team. Also make sure to learn any tips for application development in cloud computing. These insights not only reduce risks but also position your business for long-term cloud success.

1) What Cloud Application Development Software Stack Experience and Expertise Do You Have?

Expect the best teams to bring expertise across multiple platforms and stacks. From AWS to Microsoft Azure and all the way to hybrid environments, skilled developers can tailor each solution to business requirements rather than vendor lock-in.

For instance, on the infrastructure side, cloud application development services can rely on Kubernetes and Docker for container orchestration, Terraform and Ansible for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and GitLab CI for seamless deployments.

As for the application layer, they can be skilled in Node.js, Python, Java, .NET Core, and Go on the backend, while delivering front-end experiences via React, Angular, and Vue.js.

Add serverless architectures as well as microservices, and you have a technology stack designed for resilience, scalability, and flexibility.

💡 There’s more to cloud-based apps than you may think. For instance, did you know that cloud-based apps aren’t the same as cloud native apps and cloud-enabled apps? If this is news to you, you should definitely explore this and other lesser-known facts of cloud based application development.

2) What’s Your Cloud Cost Optimization Philosophy?

A cloud cost optimization philosophy is the mindset, principles, and practices followed to ensure maximum value out of cloud investments while keeping spending under control.

Instead of treating cloud bills as a fixed expense, it’s about actively managing, monitoring, and fine-tuning usage to ensure performance, scalability, and cost stay balanced.

Without a clear philosophy, cloud costs can spiral out of control. Especially due to unused resources, inefficient architectures, or the lack of monitoring.

So, if you wish your apps to be financially sustainable and strategically beneficial, you’ll need to learn how to implement cloud cost optimization strategies in an enterprise.

You can get an idea of your tech partner’s philosophy by inquiring about how they handle –

• Right-Sizing Resources – Find out how the company prevents over-provisioning and how it matches workloads to the correct instance types, storage classes, and compute power.
• Elasticity and Auto-Scaling – Learn about scaling criteria so that you don’t pay for unused capacity.
• Smart Pricing Models – Ask if you can use reserved instances, spot instances, or committed-use discounts for predictable workloads instead of always paying on-demand prices.
• Serverless and Event-Driven Architectures – Inquire about adopting pay-per-execution models such as AWS Lambda to cut idle costs.
• Monitoring and Visibility – You should know how your new cloud application development services provider tracks consumption patterns to catch anomalies and waste.
• Governance and Accountability – Discuss the policies, tagging strategies, and budgets beforehand to know who’s responsible for the cloud spend.

3) What Other Services Do You Offer in Addition to Cloud Development Services?

True cloud transformation doesn’t end at development. It’s just an important milestone on your journey.

The real transformation happens when organizations continuously evolve their applications, infrastructure, and processes to fully harness the flexibility, scalability, and intelligence the cloud provides.

So, you’ll need to go beyond development to avail cloud tech services such as:

• Cloud migration and modernization to move legacy apps to cloud-native environments.
• Cloud security and compliance consulting to ensure applications meet regulatory standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
• Managed DevOps services to support initiatives like pipeline automation and container orchestration.
• AI/ML integration for embedding intelligence into applications with custom models or pre-trained APIs.
• 24/7 monitoring and support for continuous maintenance and proactive issue resolution.

It’s about creating a living ecosystem that can adapt to new technologies, business demands, and customer expectations. Only then can you truly build a future-ready foundation for growth and innovation.

4) What Role Does Automation Play in Your Development Process?

Automation is the backbone of efficient, reliable cloud development. It automates repetitive tasks, freeing up cloud application development services to focus on innovation. It further improves reliability, accelerates app delivery, and reduces the risk of human error.

A common practice you may want to be on the lookout for is the use of CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

CI/CD pipelines are automated workflows that enable development teams to deliver software faster, safer, and with fewer errors. The term combines two practices:

• Continuous Integration (CI) – Developers frequently merge their code changes into a shared repository. Each change triggers automated builds and tests, ensuring the new code works well with existing code.
• Continuous Delivery/Deployment (CD) – Once code passes tests, it’s automatically delivered to staging or production environments. This means new features, bug fixes, and updates can reach users quickly without manual intervention.

CI/CD pipelines act like an assembly line for software development, automatically building, testing, and deploying applications. As a result, teams can focus on innovation rather than repetitive tasks.

As for IaC, it allows teams to define and manage infrastructure using machine-readable configuration files instead of manual processes. This differs from traditional IT where manual configuration is needed for setting up servers, databases, and networks.

IaC enables developers to write scripts that automatically provision entire environments. This ensures consistency across development, staging, and production, reduces setup time, and makes scaling effortless.

IaC also integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, meaning infrastructure and application code can be deployed together. The result is a faster, more reliable, and repeatable development lifecycle.

Some cloud application development services will go the extra mile, implementing automated monitoring and alerting systems to track application health and resource consumption in real-time. This further translates into faster releases, fewer bugs, and a scalable process that grows with your business.

5) What Cloud Deployment Strategies Do You Usually Follow?

You may be wondering why you need to learn about cloud deployment strategies.

Thing is this isn’t just a technical detail; it’s a factor toward making informed decisions that directly impact cost, performance, and business continuity. Your chosen strategy determines how new features are released, how downtime is minimized, and how risks are managed.

You also get to align technology decisions with business priorities, be they speed to market, user experience, or regulatory compliance. Plus, this knowledge empowers you to ask the right questions, evaluate trade-offs, and hold development partners accountable.

In short, deployment strategies shape not only how applications run in the cloud, but also how effectively they support business goals.

Depending on the use case, you can expect your tech partner to resort to one or a combination of the following:

• Blue-Green Deployments (where two environments run in parallel for seamless rollback)
• Canary Releases (gradually rolling out features to a subset of users before full release)
• Rolling Updates (where instances are updated incrementally to minimize downtime)
• Serverless Deployments (for environments that benefit from on-demand scaling and pay-per-use pricing)

Each deployment is guided by business priorities, whether that’s minimizing downtime, validating features in production, or achieving rapid scalability.

💡 Planning on leveraging Kubernetes’ cloud development capabilities? Then you’ll need the right Kubernetes deployment strategy, one that strikes the right balance between your business goals and tolerance for risk. By aligning deployment choices with priorities such as reliability, speed, and scalability, you ensure Kubernetes truly supports your long-term success.

6) What Approach Do You Use to Integrate DevOps with Cloud?

When it comes to cloud application development services, DevOps is a must-have. While the cloud delivers on-demand infrastructure, scalability, and flexibility, DevOps provides the culture, tools, and automation to make the most of it.

DevOps practices like CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, and automated monitoring ensure that teams can deploy and manage applications quickly, consistently, and reliably. Together with cloud tech, it empowers organizations to innovate faster, reduce downtime, and create seamless user experiences.

The best approach entails building cloud-native DevOps pipelines that ensure speed, collaboration, and reliability.

For instance, they can start with version control integration, followed by automated build, test, and deploy pipelines. Using tools like Kubernetes, they can ensure consistency in containerized environments. Monitoring and logging are then automated with tools like Prometheus.

The outcome is a continuous feedback loop: developers commit code → it’s tested and deployed automatically → telemetry provides insights → improvements cycle back into development. As a result, releases are faster, safer, and more iterative.

7) How Do You Monitor Performance Post Application Development for Cloud?

There’s a reason cloud performance monitoring is a must-have.

Cloud apps are highly dynamic; resources scale up and down, traffic patterns shift, and services interact across distributed environments. Without proper monitoring, small inefficiencies or hidden errors can quickly escalate into costly outages or poor user experiences.

Take the GitHub outage of 2018 for instance. The code-hosting platform suffered a 24-hour outage after a routine database maintenance went wrong, disrupting millions of developers worldwide.

The incident highlighted the need for stronger monitoring, replication, and failover testing. It proved that even leading platforms can falter without robust cloud performance visibility and resilience strategies in place.

So, discuss what your future cloud application development services provider offers when it comes to ensuring end-to-end visibility and proactive performance management.

Ideally, they should track uptime, response times, and error rates. They must also have logs and metrics centralized for analysis, as well as AI-powered alerts to flag anomalies before they escalate into downtime.

Moreover, your team should be able to conduct periodic performance audits to identify bottlenecks and load/stress testing to ensure apps can handle traffic spikes. The combination of automated tools with human oversight ensures your cloud apps remain stable, secure, and optimized long after launch.

Your Search for a Cloud Application Development Company Can End Here

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So, let us know how we can help.