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