It is a widely accepted notion that the cloud brings immense power and scalability at the finger tips of developers and testers. However, a good measure of the utility of any platform or tooling for a developer/tester lies in the answer to a simple question: “How productive can I be in shipping a quality product for my customers?” The question is simple, but entails various details, a sample of which are provided below:
- Get the operating system installed on one or more machines.
- Set up the development stack, which may involve installing multiple components on more than one machine.
- Set up the test environment to run a variety of tests ranging in scope and complexity from build verification tests to full scale functional & stress testing.
- Set up the environment in a known state repeatedly and reliably.
- Reliably reproduce bugs and save the state of the test environment so that debugging can be performed in real time without blocking anyone. This is especially true for those complex bugs that are hard to reproduce (and needless to say, more often than not such bugs are resolved as ‘No Repro’).
- Share access to the running application, or a component of your application, with your dev/test buddy to get a second pair of eyes on it for debugging.
These tasks consume a large portion of a dev/team’s cycles, however they do not accrue directly to the code that is actually written/tested for the product. These steps become even more involved in case of complex distributed application (think: classic n-tier apps). Wouldn’t it be great if accomplishing these tasks was as simple as clicking a few buttons? Dev/Test teams can take advantage the Skytap platform to address many of these aspects of developing applications. Skytap platform enables dev/test teams to:
- Easily deploy a variety of operating systems on a multiple machines by simply choosing from a large library of OSs.
- Configure machines as desired, ‘Save’ your work along the way and finally save the ‘golden’ state of the entire environment.
- Share the ‘golden’ state with the entire team such that each dev/test in the team can bring up her own copy of the development environment as needed.
- Mutate the ‘golden’ state in any manner for development or testing purposes and still have the ability to start afresh
- Have direct access to every machine in your environment and the ability to grant (or not) similar access to other members of your team
- Capture the state of your environment, after a complex set of repro steps for a bug, and instantiate a copy for debugging
- Replicate your on-prem network for your application, such that you can develop and test your applications with high fidelity
- And many more…
Try out the product for free to assess these benefits for yourself.
– Sumit Mehrotra, Skytap Product Team
