Tag: provisioning

In previous blog posts, we covered Jenga (our environment construction tool) and did a deep dive into how we use Jenga as a component in delivering fully functional clones of our production environment. We’re very happy with this delivery pipeline, and the test environments it produces. Our engineers always have up-to-date templates for development or […]

Last week, we shared Part I of our three-part presentation, “Evaluating Application Modernization Solutions.” In this chapter, Skytap’s Sumit Mehrotra details how on-demand access to production-grade dev/test environments eliminates contention and costs associated with provisioning wait times, and enables teams to maintain configuration, consistency, collaboration, and control inside continuous integration.   Be sure and visit […]

We are pleased to announce our latest open-source release – a Dynamic Ansible Inventory for use with Skytap Environments. Ansible is commonly used by DevOps teams to coordinate configuration changes for hosts over SSH (for Linux/Unix machines) or Powershell remoting (Windows). Ansible’s simple approach and ease of integration with existing infrastructure make it an attractive utility […]

Last month, I came across an article from BT Group’s Peter Shaw, titled, “How the cloud is clearing the headaches of drug development” and was truly marveled by something. The similarities between the development of drugs and software are remarkable. This isn’t the first time the software development process has been compared to another industry, […]

Leading software companies are discovering that leveraging the cloud for development and test can slash both cycle times and costs by enabling dev/test teams to quickly spin up multiple development stacks and test environments on demand. This type of agile environment is proving particularly beneficial to IT teams that are also tasked with support of […]

Over the past few years it would have been hard to miss the slow and systematic outsourcing of certain parts of corporate IT. The primary solution has been cloud computing—which, of course, means the market is flush with cloud providers—and a lot of hype. With so many options to choose from, it becomes even more […]

For this edition of the ‘Ask a Skytap Engineer’ series, I spoke with Lonnie Hutchinson, Senior Architect with Skytap. Lonnie focuses on provisioning and orchestration. Prior to joining Skytap, he worked on a purpose-built database for storing high volumes of time-based performance metrics for HP. In his spare time Lonnie dabbles in amateur astronomy, metalworking, […]

In a new article, Network World has named 2013 the year of the hybrid cloud. The article also includes 10 predictions by industry analysts, and two in particular caught my eye. Prediction #1: Hybrid clouds will take off. That is, in fact, exactly what we are seeing happen on the front lines here at Skytap. […]

Aging infrastructure is one reason that many companies make the decision to integrate cloud solutions. Trek, one of the largest bicycle manufacturers in the world, had a point-of-sale software called Ascend, with a development and test IT infrastructure based on an old VMware environment consisting of four servers, a SAN storage system, and limited on-premises […]