REDMOND, Wash. – ALM 3 SUMMIT – January 29, 2013 – Skytap Inc., the leading provider of self-service cloud automation solutions, today unveiled a new Automation Pack that seamlessly enables on-premise Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), Visual Studio and Testing Manager workflows to dynamically create testing environments in Skytap Cloud. The Automation Pack offers flexible support for a wide range of application development workloads, ranging from .NET client applications to complex n-tier server applications, such as SharePoint. With these capabilities, customers using TFS and Visual Studio 2012 can accelerate build-deploy-test (BDT) workflows, increase business agility, and lower costs using Skytap Cloud.
Agile development and testing methodologies enable businesses to accelerate the delivery of new software products to market. While some cloud services have attempted to provide a foundation for these agile environments, they often require sacrifices from the development and test teams. Many cloud providers operate at the basic infrastructure-as-a-service level, which typically require an up-front time and resource investment to create the target cloud environments in advance. The Skytap Automation Pack brings together the best of both worlds, providing the automated scale and elasticity of cloud infrastructure coupled with the preferred tools and processes that development and test teams are currently using today.
“Agile development for the cloud demands rapid deployment, a high focus on user experience and access to highly elastic resources for software testing, while requiring comparatively less underlying infrastructure for developing applications,” said Asheesh Raina, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a report titled “Market Trends: Application Development Software, Worldwide, 2012-2016.” “The trend is compelling enough to force traditional agile development vendors to ‘cloud enable’ their existing offerings and position them as a service to be delivered through the cloud.”
The Skytap Automation Pack is software that installs on Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012, providing workflow automation and seamless integration with Skytap Cloud. With this solution, customers can:
- Run TFS on-premise and automatically spin-up, run, and tear down complex Microsoft development and testing environments in Skytap Cloud on-demand
- Dynamically provision secure VPN network connectivity between test environments in Skytap Cloud and TFS without manual intervention
- Create golden templates of complete test environments in Skytap Cloud using Microsoft Test Manager – automating the creation of identical clean environments for each test pass
- Automatically snapshot entire test environments in Skytap Cloud to investigate and diagnose root cause of test pass failures
- Review consolidated test pass reports using Microsoft Test Manager
- Support complex testing requirements of n-tier applications with virtual test environments that are identical to production environments on-premise or in Microsoft Azure
“Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 is an Enterprise ALM solution that enables teams to deliver software at a continuous cadence with agility and quality. The lab management capability of the solution delivers self-service experiences for developers and testers that reduce the cycle times in provisioning and managing development and test environments with operational compliance,” said Karthik Ravindran, senior director of ALM product management at Microsoft. “With the Skytap Automation Pack, teams can extend their Team Foundation Server ALM lab infrastructure beyond their on-premise investments, to include the option of the Skytap cloud infrastructure. This option will enable teams to burst to the Skytap cloud from within their ALM workflows for dev and test lab management and gain the economics of scale benefits of cloud computing for dev and test workloads.”
By deploying TFS and Visual Studio workloads in Skytap Cloud, businesses can eliminate the time and effort required to provision, configure, and manage complex on-premise test environments. Customers benefit from Skytap’s Intelligent Automation Platform, which offers self-service automation, team collaboration, and visibility and control capabilities not available with traditional cloud environments. For example, distributed teams of developers and testers can create and collaborate on highly parallelized testing environments. With on-demand access to Skytap Cloud, customers can scale up and quickly deploy additional environments as needed to accelerate software development and testing cycles. Users can also leverage other existing development and test tools in a hybrid cloud environment by creating secure VPN connections from on-premise environments to Skytap Cloud.
“In order to be a truly Agile development process, the entire application lifecycle must be fast, including the provisioning of test environments and the speed at which you can deploy your application into these environments,” said Sumit Mehrotra, director of product management at Skytap. “By combining their on-premise TFS or Visual Studio environments with Skytap Cloud, Agile teams can deliver products faster, increasing the speed at which the organization can generate revenue.”
Skytap’s director of product management, Sumit Mehrotra, will be speaking at the Microsoft ALM 3 Summit as part of a panel on Agile testing, helping software development teams adopt the best practices that fit their organizations. As part of the presentation, Sumit will provide a live demonstration of the new Skytap Automation Pack for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server. The presentation will take place on Thurs., Jan. 31 at 12:45 p.m. PT in the Cascade room of Microsoft Conference Center, Building 33 on Microsoft’s Redmond campus.
