Cloud computing speeds up new military software Army Futures Command's Software Factory, newly opened in Texas. (Luke J. Allen/U.S. Army) At the recently launched Army Software Factory in Austin, Texas, platform product manager Capt. James Cho uses cloud computing to speed software development. Coders — who create software for anything from streamlining warehouse operations to improving soldiers’ battlefield performance — take advantage of the cloud’s shared storage, databases and networking that make computing resources more powerful and flexible than those available in on-site data centers. With cloud, “you can dynamically spin up more instances or compute power as needed,” Cho said. “A lot of the toil you would have in managing an on-prem solution for this is abstracted away, and it reduces the amount of work we have to do scale these applications for deployment across the Army.”