Also known as cloud-based development or in-cloud development.Consist in build, test,run and deploy your software in a cloud provider such as Amazon Cloud 9,Google Cloud Platform, Heroku, Microsoft Azure… Actually these providers have a lot of services,features and tools that you can use to publish your apps for the public.These cloud providers are helping businesses giving them a lot of serivces,resources and tools to make an analisis of the services that you are using in your system in real time such as Amazon Cloud Watch for example.
One of the benefits of Cloud Development is that you don’t need to have physical hardware or servers instead we can have these servers and hardware in the cloud reducing the cost of have a data-center for example.You only have to pay for the resources that you are consuming.
One of the difference between Cloud Development and Traditional Development is that in cloud development the software is developed, tested and run within a cloud environment meanwhile in the Traditional you have to test and run the software locally then test it in diferent environments such as develop environment.
Another feature of the cloud development is the self-service basically it doesn’t require human intervention to get more resourses becuase you might have already a configuration to scale your app in case that you need more resources.
The elasticity is one of the powerful features in the Cloud Development because for example you can reduce the resources during the night when all your customers are sleeping allowing you save a lot of money.