Agility means more than just speed. It also comes down to flexibility. The cloud provides that flexibility to companies by offerings services on demand, and when a company needs more storage or compute, it’s there. When they don’t, those things go away. Combining virtualized infrastructure with the cloud creates an entirely new way of developing information technology products.

“Our developers are just looking for us to get out of their way. They want containers; they want them now. They want VMs [virtual machines]; they want them now. And every day I turn around, they want bigger VMs and bigger containers,” said Juan Gaviria (pictured), senior director of technical systems engineering at ADP LLC.

Gaviria spoke with host Stu Miniman (@stu) and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren) of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas. They discussed how ADP uses the cloud and the company’s development environment. (* Disclosure below.)

Virtualization, cloud become vital dev team tools

ADP is a payroll processing company that serves more than 650,000 companies and organizations. Over time, the business has seen a lot of changes in how customers consume its services. Now, customers are turning to smartphones and other mobile devices, and because of this, ADP has refocused on mobile-first technologies, Gaviria explained. This kind of demand calls for new technologies.

ADP has been running VMware since the early days of virtualization, according to Gaviria. Likewise, the company’s development teams are working with the latest innovations like containers and cloud services. Virtualization, combined with these new tools, allows the dev teams to keep up with the pace of change in the IT industry.

One of the cloud services used by ADP for development is Amazon Web Services. AWS has proved a leader in cloud, so this is not surprising. ADP is designing many of its new products to work on AWS. “We plan on leveraging that relationship to help us burst in that dev cloud,” Gaviria said.

In the dev environment, they often get requests that come out of left field. Bursting, as Gaviria mentioned, means quickly rolling out new infrastructure through the cloud to handle those sudden requests. This capability is one of cloud’s major benefits, he stated.

“We can put that capacity out on AWS much faster, and as those projects materialize, we can then bring that back in,” Gaviria said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE