Skytap provides us with far greater flexibility than a physical IT lab. Testing our software on client platforms, such as Windows 7, can be achieved without waiting for IT operations to manually provision machines.- Ron Yun, Director, Quality Assurance, Ellie Mae
Accelerate Agile Development Cycles
- Run Multiple Virtual Data Centers On-Demand in Parallel
- Enable Rapid Defect Resolution with Snapshots and Clones
- Enable Global Collaboration for Multiple Product and Release Teams
Screencast: Developer Multi-Tasking in the Cloud
Building high quality software on time and on budget is a complex challenge. That challenge is further magnified if you do not have access to scalable, flexible and cost effective computing resources. Using a public infrastructure as a service solution may appear cheap and scalable initially, but soon developers and test engineers find that costs go up significantly. They also discover that the set-up process is manual and the security and auditing controls are inadequate. Most importantly, the infrastructure often requires a complex and expensive re-write.
Developers and testers are faced with a huge dilemma: How do I get access to a scalable, ready-to-go cloud dev/test environment that can also provide the visibility and control I need?
Skytap's Development and Test Solution resolves that dilemma.
Skytap's application development and test solution empowers developers and test engineers with scalable cloud based virtual data centers (VDC) that can run their software without any rewrites. As a developer, whether you are following the agile development model or the waterfall model, you can use Skytap Cloud to create multiple development configurations instantly, run them in parallel, and customize them to meet your needs. You can publish specific environments to your remote testing teams. Test engineers can scale load testing capacity on-demand for a fraction of the cost of on-premise resources. Support engineers can easily create environments that are identical to customer's, reproducing product and performance issues, snapshotting entire configurations and sharing them with testing and development teams across the globe for deeper inspection.
At the same time, development and test managers gain visibility and control over their cloud usage. They can create standardized development environments and provide them to product teams with assigned quota and track usage through comprehensive reports. Role based access can be provided to the various groups and users along with strict security policy deployment and enforcement.
Skytap's Development and Test solution can be used for a broad range of development and testing scenarios, including:
- Developer Workstations
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- System Testing
- User Acceptance Testing
- Performance Testing
- Localization Testing
Top 5 Features and Benefits at a Glance
| Feature | Key Benefit |
|---|---|
| Scalable, On-demand Cloud Environments | Accelerate Agile Development and Test Cycles.
|
| Snapshots and Templates | Enable Rapid Defect Resolution.
|
| Groups, Projects and Roles | Enable Global Collaboration For Multiple Product And Release Teams
|
| Advanced Networks | Recreate Customer Use Cases With Virtual Data Centers
|
| REST-based Web services API | Automate Cloud Resource Management
|
| And More... | Register for a complete demo. |
Accelerate Agile Development and Test Cycles With Scalable Virtual Datacenters
As a developer you can use the Skytap Development and Test solution to set-up multiple configurations and customize each one to suit your unique needs. You can run multiple configurations in parallel easily, and tear-down once your development and testing needs are met. As a tester, you can create configurations that represent various database, operating system, browser, application build and middleware combinations and spin them up on-demand. You can customize the networking, hardware, and storage properties of these configurations to match your in-house test labs. You can easily scale these configurations to hundreds of concurrent machines that can represent thousands of users. Since each configuration is completely isolated and powered by Skytap's scalable cloud infrastructure, you can run multiple environments concurrently without impacting other users.
Enable Rapid Defect Resolution with Snapshots and Clones
Since most software applications are deployed in a multi-tier model (database tier, application tier, web tier), reproducing complex bugs and resolving them quickly is often a huge challenge. To reproduce a complex bug, development and test teams often set up multiple test labs with identical environments that are costly to set up, underutilized, and time consuming to manage. The Skytap Cloud Library eliminates this challenge. As a development manager, you can set-up multiple standardized development and test environments as a template in the Skytap Cloud Library. Your developers and testing teams can provision new environments with a simple point and click. Development and testing teams can also perform destructive tests - change database settings, application settings, router policies and see how your application behaves. You can get back to a "clean slate" easily by redeploying the source template. Since each configuration is completely network fenced, you can install intrusive tools, test the application behavior and restore back to a safe version. As developers progress through the software development life cycle, any point where they encounter a defect can be preserved. With snapshots an entire virtual data center including all of its machines, data, memory state, network settings and application state are preserved within a template. These templates can be shared with remote teams for rapid bug reproduction, even used in parallel for testing with deeper inspection and accelerated bug resolution.
Enable Global Collaboration for Multiple Product and Release Teams Using Groups, Projects and Roles
Distributed development and testing is a reality today. Using Skytap's Dev/Test solution, development managers can create user groups and assign them specific roles in multiple projects. The role of each team member can be different within each project and each role has customized access polices. Team members can include internal and external contractors that have restricted roles and rights compared to employees. Project members can share configurations, templates, assets and files specific to their projects, and collaborate during the entire development cycle. This model brings users together quickly, empowers collaboration, and maintains consistency while increasing the productivity of the entire team.
Recreate Customer Use Cases with Virtual Data Centers and Advanced Networks
With Skytap's Development and Test solution, developing a multi-tier application with clustering and fail-over support is remarkably easy. You can create multiple networks in each configuration, add multiple network adapters to each virtual machine, connect them to different networks, configure routing policies and ensure you have an accurate depiction of production environments in the cloud while you develop and test. You can do all of that with just a simple point and click interface and save those advanced configurations as templates for rapid re-start. This dramatically accelerates your development productivity while giving you the power and flexibility you need to develop complex enterprise applications in the cloud.
Automate Cloud Resource Management with REST based API
Skytap provides a powerful REST based API that you can use to operate your development and test configurations programmatically. You can create new configurations from templates, publish configurations to remote team members, add new machines to existing configurations, and kick off new builds and test scenarios based on applications running in Skytap Cloud.
Download the 451 Group analyst report to learn more about what "Cloud automation" is all about and how development and test organizations can benefit.