For the past few years, the holy grail of enterprise IT is to have large scale global software development, testing and integration activities that “follow the sun.” So when your development team checks in and goes home in San Jose, CA, there’s a testing team just getting started in Bangalore, India. And when they check in, there might be another team building services in Germany atop the application suite, followed by a release configuration team in Buenos Aires. Following the sun means we can be productive toward our software goals 24 hours a day.
While this idea is great in theory, it often breaks down due to the fact that realistic dev and test environments are hard to come by. When globally distributed teams attempt to collaborate, they can’t get access to the latest version of today’s complex application environments, because there are too many changing components to update and move. If only there was something like a tooth fairy, that would magically swap out these systems for change in the night… for “Follow the Moon” development!
With the new Copy-to-Region function in the latest release of Skytap Cloud (a version we affectionately called R58), we might just change all that, by enabling “Follow the Moon” environments. [Read the official announcement here.]
How does this happen? When a development or test team shuts down and goes to sleep, they can have an exact copy of their entire environment “follow the moon” and get passed along to a new SaaS-based cloud lab instance, in a data center located nearest to the next team in the software lifecycle. Skytap’s Copy to Region allows multi-tier environments to be suspended, copied, and spun up in the next global cloud-based instance, so each team is automatically working with the latest configuration needed for their project to move forward.
- No more pointing fingers about developers not being able to reproduce and fix defects.
- No more complaints from testers about not having all the latest deployments and test data set up.
- Skytap Cloud offers a SaaS-based management layer that brings us a new paradigm of Follow the Moon, so your SDLC can finally follow the sun.
Hey, it’s better than getting a rocket in your eye!
Whether your dev/test teams are geographically dispersed across the globe or not, take a Skytap Cloud tour to see for yourself how Skytap helps your teams share the latest, most up to date configurations possible!
