Why traditional VPSs are no longer fit for the modern developer

Virtual private servers, or VPSs, play an essential role in the developer’s toolbox. They present an isolated development space that can be shared with other users, making a cost-effective solution for deploying alpha or beta applications, testing software and experimenting with configurations. The reserved resources grant full control without putting production systems at risk of interference.

Source: IONOS

But times have changed significantly since VPSs were first introduced at the start of the century. The kinds of projects a typical developer works on have gone from building applications on monolithic architecture to designing complex microservice arrays deployed across distributed cloud environments.

While a developer’s daily work has evolved, standard VPSs haven’t kept pace. Their limited out-of-the-box compatibility with modern DevOps practices and Infrastructure-as-Code environments often makes integration time-consuming. This forces developers to spend significant effort on manual configuration and infrastructure setup, distracting them from core development tasks.

Last June, a study found that UK businesses waste over £10.4 billion each year as developers manually carry out routine tasks. In fact, they spend an average of just 52 minutes a day creating original code. Traditional VPS use has a more direct financial implication, as prepaid models tend to offer limited cost control. Inadvertently exceeding the bandwidth, storage and compute limits can easily lead to budget overruns in the thousands and increase businesses’ cost burden significantly.

A recent study found that 83 per cent of developers experience burnout from work, which isn’t helped by peripheral workloads such as creating and tearing down virtual infrastructure. While the situation could be aided by larger IT teams, 93 percent of businesses say there is an IT skills gap in the UK jobs market, making hiring talented individuals challenging.

As a result of these issues, cloud provider IONOS has created Cloud Cubes. These cost-effective and flexible VPSs are designed specifically to make the developer’s life easier.

These test environments, built on a true cloud platform, precisely replicate your production environment for seamless development progression.

Cloud Cubes provide a more comprehensive and user-friendly solution than a standard VPS and are built on data-secure, GDPR-compliant infrastructure, so code can move from dev to QA to prod without any heavy lifting. They also offer transparent pay-as-you-go, per-minute billing to prevent overspending. A set of REST APIs allows for easy connection to applications and ensures complete embedding into distributed IT environments.

Source: IONOS

Container-based technologies also offer a compelling development runtime alternative to virtual machines. Lightweight, portable, and scalable, they free developers to focus on coding rather than system configuration, streamlining continuous integration (CI). This aligns with modern CI/CD workflows, allowing resources to be dynamically allocated on-demand, eliminating bottlenecks caused by manual configuration while code awaits execution.

Cloud-native tools like Kubernetes can be used to automate scaling, load balancing and fault tolerance, ensuring optimal resource allocation.

IONOS offers a Managed Kubernetes service that offers flexible configuration options for efficient resource utilisation and, therefore, cost management. It makes commissioning workspaces quick and easy via the optional Cloud-Init feature, using the supplied SDK or APIs. Setting template values for users and permissions, for example, makes fast replication of environments simple.

With enhanced flexibility, integration, performance and management capabilities, Cloud Cubes and Managed Kubernetes are well-suited for developers looking to optimise their workloads for modern application development and deployment needs.

Sign up for a free trial today to discover more about how Cloud Cubes can make your life easier and bring immediate benefits to your team.