One of the biggest reasons that cloud services make our jobs easier is because they offer rapid access to pre-installed, pre-configured services. If we think about this from the standpoint of a developer, tester, or anyone else dependent on IT services, this helps us in two big ways.
First, instead of the traditional lead time of days or weeks to provision IT services, we get access to those same services in a matter of minutes.
Second, because the services are pre-configured, we eliminate a lot of the manual, error-prone work associated with configuring services after the initial provisioning.
While there are other benefits to a cloud-based approach to IT service delivery, increased delivery speeds and consistency are significant boons.