Inside the McDonald's IT department, there are times when a great deal of application development takes place and times that are relatively slow. Because of the peaks and valleys of the development team's work cycle, it made sense to move the process to a cloud-computing environment, reports eWeek's Darryl Taft.

"The challenge for me is when I'm trying to provide an environment for my application teams to deliver a product and they need XYZ tooling, I have to buy enough tooling to cover everyone in that peak moment, which ends up being really costly," said Scott Farnum, global infrastructure lab manager for the fast food chain. "Then, outside that peak moment, we are not using those tools, and in some cases we will slow down development accordingly. So we needed a model that was going to be flexible to any business condition and any development condition."

McDonald's chose CloudOne, an IBM partner, to help in the migration of the IBM Rational toolset to the cloud environment. The Rational toolset covers the full software-development lifecycle, but it is not cheap. By using CloudOne to move to the cloud, the fast food chain pays only for the tools that it needs. Since moving application development to the cloud, McDonald's has seen a 50 percent improvement in product performance.

"When we went to CloudOne, it became easier for them to support the products if they siloed each one onto its own server set," Farnum said. "That sped all those applications up, and made them easier to support. And we could do things like upgrade that one product for Windows 7 if we needed to and leave the others alone."

Farnum recommends that an IT department be in the habit of using Internet-based systems and maintain a flexible mindset before migrating to a cloud-computing platform.

For more:
- see Darryl Taft's article at eWeek

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