On Wednesdy, August 26th, Skytap and CA Technologies will present a joint webinar, “Accelerated Application Releases in Cloud Environments: It’s Baked In!” where we’ll show how to eliminate SDLC bottlenecks and achieve faster velocity.
Skytap’s Jason English will join Tim Mueting from CA Technologies (read his latest CA communities blog about it here) to share how you can easily integrate cloud-based environment provisioning within automated application deployment workflows, resulting in what they’re calling a “magic time warp oven for baking software releases.”
We sat down with Jason to learn more about what he and Tim will be sharing, and why the partnership between Skytap and CA Technologies is such a natural fit.
Is the idea of a software release “magic time warp oven” something that enterprises today don’t wholly know exists?
There is definitely a certain level of acceptance we have for “time spent waiting” on both manual, as well as scripted configuration tasks. At a high level, it seems we have come a long way, since many of these processes can be automated, and require less human intervention other than initial setup, and developers seem to be delivering faster than ever.
But scripts take time to run and deploy. Someone has to review and approve processes, and often IT is involved in the infrastructure provisioning process behind each release cycle. So as throughput increases, bottlenecks suddenly appear at these handoff points between teams and between processes. It comes down to efficient handoffs to get us to that warp speed.
The abstract for this webinar mentions the benefits of, “getting out of the business of infrastructure recipes.” Is this one of the challenges of, “We can build it ourselves”—failing to see that that time could be better spent on something that actually generates business revenue?
We are not knocking infrastructure recipes; we use them ourselves! It’s good to see and understand everything that is running behind a given workload. What matters is who should write these specifications? Should we expect developers and testers to become experts in coding the entire infrastructure stack behind their apps? Or should we leave them the most time to focus on writing innovative code and testing business functionality and performance to make better software?
Speed is obviously a huge motivator for app releases in this day and age, but how is quality also improved improved by using cloud environments?
Any defensive driving class can tell you speed kills. But it’s also the only way to stay ahead of the competition and survive. Using cloud mitigates the risk of fast change.
You can instantly give all teams their own dev/test/release environments, or cordon them off from each other securely, so they can all work and test in parallel without impacting each other. That’s faster and better software that will be far less likely to fail in production because it’s been so thoroughly tested and deployed through each phase in cloud environments.
What’s unique, innovative, and exciting about how Skytap and CA Technologies integrate?
CA Release Automation (CA RA) is one part of a really cool application delivery portfolio of tools at CA. Over the last 5 years it’s been a sort of a renaissance in automation and eliminating bottlenecks at each stage with automation. When you tie that to their Service Virtualization solution (which I used to sell!) and the newer data virtualization and agile project tooling they have brought on, you are really talking about a leading application suite for this task, and at enterprise scale.
Now tie all that to orchestrate all CA RA build/deploy activities into instant “golden template” Skytap cloud environments, and then conduct testing in parallel, elastically scaled instances, including all external services and data dependencies accounted for by CA’s SV/DV, you are really cooking with fire. This is great because they also own and can image a lot of that difficult legacy technology we need to continue supporting and bringing forward, which positions them ideally to fill the agile needs of large companies.
Join us on Wednesday, August 26th, where we’ll dive deeper into how we help you consistently release better software faster by removing the constraints and bottlenecks that are far too common in today’s enterprise SDLC. Register now!
