Development and Testing
Dev/Test Environments in the Cloud
Application development teams are shifting toward the trend of iterative, Agile development. By leveraging Agile development methodologies, developers, test engineers, and QA teams can develop, test, and deploy software applications faster—which can be a competitive differentiator. With the cloud, developers can deploy complete production-like development stacks—saving time and expense over traditional on-premises deployments, enabling faster handoff from development to operations. To move faster, these once siloed teams need to be tightly integrated and have the ability to provision their own environments on-demand rather than going through a long IT procurement process.
Developers, test engineers and QA managers are faced with a dilemma: How do you get access to a scalable, ready-to-go cloud development and testing environment quickly, easily, and securely?
Skytap Cloud for development and testing resolves this dilemma
Skytap Cloud empowers developers and test engineers with scalable virtual datacenters. You simply bring your existing applications, tools, and processes completely intact to Skytap Cloud and create multiple development configurations in seconds, 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 performance and load testing capacity on-demand. With Skytap Cloud, you can:
- Run existing apps with no changes or create new ones
- Start from 100s of OS and database templates or import your VM images
- Create complex environments with 100s of VMs and multiple networks
- Scale environments to 10s of networks, 100s of machines, 1000s of GB storage
- Collaborate and share complete environments
- Gain desktop access to VMs without exposing them on the public Internet
- Enable global collaboration for multiple product and release teams
- Suspend and resume multi-VM environments in seconds
- Run multiple environments in parallel without resource constraints or IP conflicts
- Publish secure desktop access to environments using a URL
- Enable rapid defect resolution with snapshots and clones
Suspend and resume VMs in seconds
The suspend and resume feature in Skytap Cloud is different than what you might have seen in other clouds. All suspend operations are done in constant time and typically complete in seconds. When you suspend an environment, Skytap saves the entire state of all VMs including its memory.
Run multiple parallel environments
Once you create a “golden master” development, test, or staging environment, you can provision multiple parallel environments from the golden master template. Run multiple tests in parallel and shorten your release cycles. As you go through your test runs, when you encounter a bug, you can create an exact copy of the environment capturing the state at that time which can be used for debugging. Unlike other clouds, Skytap Cloud environments run in an isolated vLAN, so there will be no networking or resource naming conflicts.
Collaborate with your team on complex development stacks
Once you set up your environments, you can easily add them to projects and invite other developers, test engineers, and QA managers, and assign them specific roles and privileges. While VMs are accessible through the Skytap SmartClient, they are not themselves accessible over the Internet without you taking specific actions, such as attaching a public IP or publishing a port.
Leveraging Skytap Cloud for Development and Testing can be used for a broad range of 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 development and testing cycles
|
| Snapshots and templates | Enable rapid defect resolution
|
| Groups, projects and roles | Enable 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
|
Accelerate application development and test cycles
As a developer, you can use the Skytap Cloud to set up multiple complex configurations and customize each one to suit your unique needs. You can run multiple configurations in parallel and tear down those environments when your 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 also customize the networking, hardware, and storage properties of these configurations to match your in-house test labs.
Watch a complex IBM Websphere Application Environment deployed in less than 60 seconds in Skytap Cloud.
Easily scale these configurations to hundreds of concurrent machines that can represent thousands of users, and since each configuration is completely isolated and powered by scalable cloud infrastructure, you can run multiple environments concurrently without impacting other users.
Enable rapid defect resolution with snapshots and clones
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. Skytap Cloud templates eliminate this challenge.
Development managers can set-up multiple standardized development and testing environments as a template in the Skytap Cloud. Developers and testing teams can provision new environments and testing teams can perform destructive tests; i.e., change database, application and router settings—to see how applications behave. You can get back to a clean slate easily by redeploying the golden template. Since each configuration is completely network fenced, you can install intrusive tools, test the application behavior, and restore back to a safe state. As developers progress through the software development life cycle, any point where they encounter a defect can be preserved. By creating a snapshot, 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 or even used in parallel for testing with deeper inspection and accelerated bug resolution.
Enable global collaboration for multiple product and release teams
Using Skytap Cloud, 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 who have restricted roles and rights that differ from 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 Skytap Cloud, 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 copy of your existing production environments. You can do all of that with just a simple point and click interface and save those advanced configurations as templates for rapid restart. 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
Skytap Cloud provides a powerful REST-based API that you can use to operate your development and testing 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.
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