1. SDL Web Cloud – My first experience and learnings

2. Disclaimer:
Please note this is my own experience while working with SDL Web cloud and you might have a different experience on few of the items while working with it

3. Development and Implementation
The development and implementation on an SDL Web Cloud environment might not be the same experience as we have it against an SDL Web Installation on local server or AWS machine.
You need to work with Amazon Workspace tool –  connect to the Workspace environment and execute your development there
There is an AWS Marketplace –   from where you can purchase/download software needed for your development like Visual Studio etc. or you may install your own software if you have valid licenses

4. Development and Implementation
AWS Workspace have a associated licenses cost per developer – so you also need to identify how many developers would be there using the Amazon Workspace
At maximum, it might happen that you may get Discovery service URL accessible from your local machine which you may use to develop remotely
In case you have a Custom Database in use – you must check whether this will be supported in the SDL Web Cloud and if yes, how and what would be the connectivity. Typically, you won’t be able to access any Custom DB in case it is deployed in the SDL Web Cloud environment from your local machine as that has to be deployed as an RDS instance and may only be allowed to access it (in case it is at all) from the Amazon Workspace environment

5. Deployment
You may not get privilege to access the environments and deploy your application at your ease – You may need to get a support account to SDL’s ticket system and raise your request through it for deployment. Based on the priority of your request this will be taken in execution – In my case, there was no well defined SLA for a ticket to deploy
In case you need to debug, investigate or get any information or logs from the environment – you won’t get a privilege to access them at your own ease but have to request them from SDL through their ticketing system

6. Supported and Out-of-Support stuff
One very important aspect of SDL Web cloud is the upgrade – you would always be with the updated SDL Web version. As per the best of my knowledge, the SDL Web version would upgrade to next version every quarter.
The Supported items list for SDL Web 8 on premise and SDL Web8 on cloud is different – this means if a latest SDL Web 8 based application is working on your local infrastructure would not gurantee to work on the SDL Web Cloud
Typically, everything marked as deprecated (but still working) in SDL Web 8 will not be supported in SDL Web 8 Cloud
The most obvious thing – legacy mode installation is not possible with SDL Web8 cloud
No Additional software installation is possible unless supported by SDL – for example: Setting up a new SOLR instance might not be supported and you may need to rely on AWS Cloud Search instead

7. Q & A?