A consistent theme here at VMworld 2014 has been development and testing. Specifically, how IT operations can deliver the development, test, continuous integration, staging, and ultimately production environments that software development and QA teams rely on. VMware announced tight integration with OpenStack in the hopes of, at least partly, helping their customers better meet the demanding needs of internal development and test teams.
Sumit Amar and Sameer Abrol of Electronic Arts told a compelling story of how they are leveraging VMware’s vCloud Automation Center and vCloud Application Director to manage the entire development environment lifecycle across both private and public clouds. EA has written several extensions to achieve this goal. These extensions manage tasks such as network provisioning and management, as well as provide tight integration with both AWS EC2 and vCloud Application Director.
Laurence Vandeyar of Tradestation presented on how VMWare and OpenStack, together, have provided internal development teams with flexible access to needed computing resources, environments and services. For Tradestation, any private cloud solution must support tiered applications, rich API access, and developer self-service.
Both Electronic Arts and Tradestation have traveled a challenging road with work yet to be done and their experiences illustrate the difficulty of turning what have been traditionally IT and operations-centric platforms and tools into manageable, secure, and reliable delivery service to address application development needs.
Did you attend VMworld 2014? What sessions or announcements made the biggest impact to you? Share your thoughts in the comments section below and lets compare notes!
