As a developer or as a tester, you understand the importance of removing roadblocks and eliminating unnecessary work. Too often development and test environments create friction in the development process because they can be difficult to provision, can't scale with testing requirements, and are difficult to share across distributed or outsourced teams.

Skytap's cloud automation solution empowers developers and testers with its scalable, on-demand cloud platform. With Skytap teams can accelerate agile delivery release cycles. Because Skytap is a cloud service, you can be up and running with Skytap immediately and scale up or down as required by your projects.

Key Benefits:

  • Provision new environments instantly
  • Enable collaboration across global development and test teams
  • Capture and resolve defects with full configuration snapshots
  • Shorten test cycles; increase test coverage
  • Enable environments for user acceptance testing
  • Fully integrate existing test tools and processes
  • Dramatically reduce test lab administrative overhead
  • Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
With Skytap we were able to go form zero servers to 70 servers in less than a month. Before Skytap this would have been impossible with our previous infrastructure capabilities. Manager IT Systems Engineering and Architecture, Coinstar

Provision new environments instantly

Skytap gives development team members instant, self-service access to dev and test environments over the Web. Creating an environment is as easy as 'point-and-click' from the Skytap Library. Because Skytap is based on open standards, you can deploy your existing applications or VMs in the cloud without any code or architectural changes. Individuals and teams can leverage snapshots to create clones of identical environments to enable separate work streams to proceed in parallel.

Enable collaboration across global development and test teams

With the rise of offshore development and testing, it's likely you have team members working in different parts of the world. Skytap offers distributed teams a common development and test environments to work on and solve the problem of inconsistent test environments . Skytap also has a rich user access model to enable teams to isolate external contractors in specific work areas.

Capture and resolve defects with full configuration snapshots

Skytap has the ability to snapshot a complete running multi-machine dev or test stack. This essentially solves the 'no-repro' problem where a developer has to painstakingly try to reproduce a bug from a defect report. Instead, a tester can snapshot the defect at the point of failure and include a Skytap Resource Link in the defect report. A developer can then spin up the environment at a later time and debug the issue.

Shorten test cycles; Increase test coverage

Skytap's cloning and rapid provisioning capabilities enables teams to run multiple identical environments in parallel to shorten testing cycles and increase test coverage across various operating systems or test scenarios. With individual teams getting access to additional environments within seconds, work is no longer constrained by the capacity of the in house lab.

Enable environments for user acceptance testing

Skytap enables team members to publish development or test environments over the Web using a Skytap Resource Link (a URL that points to a multi-machine stack in Skytap). It's ideal for publishing prototypes and getting iterative feedback from users.

Fully integrate existing test tools and processes

Because Skytap enables you to leverage your existing applications and virtual machine appliances, development and test teams can continue to use the same development and test tools that they know and love. Skytap supports common frameworks such as Eclipse, Visual Studio, and SpringSource and common test tools such as those from IBM/Rational and HP/Mercury in addition to open source tools.

Dramatically reduce test lab administrative overhead

Development and test lab administration is a common problem for both development teams and IT administrators. Even when hardware is centralized in a common pool, virtual machine environments can become difficult to manage and track when multiple teams are provisioning and re-provisioning environments to meet the test matrix requirements . Skytap solves this problem by providing a configuration library to create, manage, track, share and deploy full virtual environments that emulate precisely what is required for testing. With a simple point and click entire environments can be deployed and run, and then suspended and saved when not in use.

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Skytap offers savings and cost control capabilities which reduce the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of dynamic IT workloads by 50% or more. Using the cloud for dynamic workloads is ideal given that these environments are typically only 20-30% utilized. The cloud requires payment for only those resources that have been consumed so hard dollar savings can be immediate. In addition, quotas can be applied to individuals and organizations to cap usage at soft or hard budget limits. Integrated Skytap Cloud Automation enables simple and fast self service provisioning ensuring that minimal users and IT effort (or cost) is required to set up or maintain environments.

Imagine the possibilities

Skytap can be used for a broad range of development and testing scenarios, including (but not limited to):

  • Developer workstations
  • Unit testing
  • Integration testing
  • System testing
  • User Acceptance testing
  • Performance testing
  • Localization testing

Download the 451 Group analyst report on 'Cloud Automation' to learn more about the benefits for development and test organizations.