Deck the Halls with Walls of Metrics

For some, the holiday season is a time to show gratitude. Others spend time with those they hold dear. Or maybe, it is a time to reflect upon the previous year, and look at the year ahead. Or, just clean out the house and donate all that stuff you didn’t need all year. These are

Environments-as-a-Service (EaaS) Explained in Only 3 Minutes!

​I’m not quite sure how he did it, but Jason English, Skytap’s Galactic Head of Product Marketing, managed to not just brilliantly explain what Skytap does, nor do it in only three minutes, but also solely create an amazing video to bolster his message! After watching, you’ll be a veritable expert in how Skytap enables:

Customer Spotlight: WorkWise to Tap Into Skytap at Upcoming Conference

​On October 14-16, WorkWise will be hosting their annual customer conference at the Potawatomi Hotel & Casino in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. WorkWise has been a customer of ours for a long time, and they’re utilizing Skytap in a unique way at this year’s conference. I sat down with Carl Wysocki, WorkWise’s director of R&D Technology, and

Webinar On-Demand: The Software Virtualization Lifecycle

​A top focus for application development today is on acceleration, but faster is not always equal to better. The bigger challenge is to improve both the speed and quality of software releases.  Orasi, one of our close partners, recently presented a webinar titled, “Software Virtualization Technology. This webinar addressed combining service virtualization technology with cloud-based

How DevOps Helps Move Your Automated Testing to the Cloud

I recently had an article published on Techwell.com entitled: How DevOps Helps Move Your Automated Testing to the Cloud. The subject of development and testing in the cloud is highly relevant to today’s enterprises. Leading software companies are discovering that leveraging the cloud for development allows teams to quickly spin up multiple development stacks and

Using the Skytap Virtual Machine Metadata Service

On August 6, 2013, Skytap announced the availability of a Skytap metadata service that allows access to Skytap-specific virtual machine (VM) metadata from within a running VM. This allows you to leverage information about a running VM from a command line, application or script running within the VM itself. Additionally, this metadata service also introduces

Video Tutorial: Skytap Templates and Configurations

​Templates are the starting point for all new configurations within Skytap Cloud. Think of them as ‘read-only blueprints’ for configurations. A template can be as simple as a single virtual machine, or as complex as an environment with dozens of virtual machines and multiple networks. Every Skytap customer has access to a variety of public

With Cloud Computing, Every Minute Counts

Benjamin Franklin coined the enduring phrase ‘Time is money.’ That was more than 2 centuries ago and it is particularly apt when describing cloud computing today. A defining characteristic of cloud computing—whether public, private, or hybrid—is its self-service nature. Computing resources are delivered on demand and end users pay based on their consumption levels, which

Using the Skytap Cloud Command Line Interface VM Template

In the April 2013 release of Skytap Cloud, we announced the availability of the public beta Skytap Cloud command line interface (CLI). Documentation for the Skytap Cloud CLI is installed along with the Skytap Cloud CLI itself, but I’ll run through the basics and offer a few tips in this blog post. Using the CLI

Ask a Skytap Engineer: Lonnie Hutchinson

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,

Skytap Experts to Speak at Spring Development and Testing Conferences

This spring, Skytap experts will be discussing enterprise cloud computing trends and showcasing award-winning software at a number of industry events, including Camp IT, SharePointlandia, STAREAST, and IBM Innovate. We’ll provide live demonstrations of Skytap Cloud, including how our software is used by enterprise customers for development and testing, software demonstrations and evaluations, and virtual

Virtual Training Made Easy in the Cloud

​Recently, I wrote a piece for Techwell.com that talked about the questions and concerns being raised by organizations interested in transitioning to cloud-based virtual training. From the article: Training organizations are always looking to provide software and technical training for employees and customers under the constraint of reduced budgets. More frequently, enterprises are choosing not