Learn how cloud can work for you: testing and development

1. opinion piece
Cloud Breathes New Life
into Test and Development

2. opinion piece | Cloud Breathes New Life into Test and Development
Today, organisations need more
agile IT environments to match
Today, organisations need more agile
the highly dynamic and resource- IT environments to match the highly
intensive needs of the application
development function. A new
dynamic and resource-intensive needs
generation of cloud services is rising of the application development function,
to the occasion.
Businesses today face as many obstacles as
without compromising the performance of
they do opportunities: shrinking budgets, production workloads.
onerous regulatory requirements, and
emerging competition from new players
in the market. As the pace of change and However, traditional test and development Creating a high-performance testing
the level of competition grow, they need environments often tend to inhibit, rather environment that directly mirrors the
to become ever more fleet-of-foot in than enable, this level of agility. Typically, production environment is no mean feat.
deploying new products and services. For IT administrators control the provisioning Additionally, developers may experience
these reasons, software and application of these resources, or the number of resistance on the part of IT administrators,
development is becoming a business-critical resources to which developers have who may be loath to divert resources
undertaking, one that has direct impact access is restricted. To access resources, away from the production environment in
on corporate revenues and customer the development team will need to apply fear of compromising service levels. And
satisfaction. for budgetary approval for a new set of even if administrators are willing and able
The returns for accelerating the time-to- dedicated computing resources, order to provide the necessary resources, the
market for key software and applications them, (impatiently) wait for delivery, install process establishing a configuration for
are measurable and immediate across and configure the resources, and finally set performance testing can be lengthy and
all industry verticals. For example, in the up the new development environment. It’s resource intensive. As a result, this step
financial services industry, providing new a costly and time-consuming arrangement. in the development process is sometimes
online capabilities for portfolio and wealth There’s also a good chance that these performed less than thoroughly, or even
management affects your ability to attract resources will end up being underutilised skipped entirely. This can lead to costly
customers and to keep them coming back. during their working lives. rework when problems aren’t discovered
If you can take a particular set of online Developers, accustomed to operating until late in the cycle, or worse still, post
services to market a month or quarter in dynamic, fast-paced environments, deployment.
ahead of your competition, you’ll directly find this prolonged process frustrating. It’s clear that the traditional approach
drive up your revenues. IT administrators, on the other hand see to testing and development isn’t
Development teams need to build new value in taking time to create development serving businesses as well as it should.
environments to design, write or debug environments that are more static, to Today, organisations need more agile
code and compile software on a regular provide maximum stability. Unsurprisingly, IT environments to match the highly
basis. To operate at maximum productivity, these opposing requirements often lead dynamic and resource-intensive needs of
development teams need access to to a dip in productivity on the part of the application development function,
properly configured computing and storage software development teams. It can also without compromising the performance of
resources, on-demand. Oftentimes, these lead to rogue purchasing of infrastructure production workloads.
environments are transitory – developers or public cloud resources. Some organisations seek to address their
will work on them for a few hours, after testing and development challenges by
which they’ll be discarded. Testing, testing increasing their number of virtual servers.
This isn’t always effective; however, while
Once new software has been developed,
the provisioning of resources will be faster,
the next step is quality assurance (QA)
it will remain a manual process, undertaken
and performance and scalability testing.
by IT administrators.
To assure performance levels, the QA
environment must provision resources that
perform at production levels. This means
high-speed networks, fast storage systems,
throughput and latency levels on a par with
those within a production environment.
Servers must be optimised with the
appropriate amount of CPU and RAM.

3. opinion piece | Cloud Breathes New Life into Test and Development
Cloud moves front and centre Cloud is clearing the way for businesses to
Cloud computing is set to take centre
stage in organisations’ efforts to make new products and services market-
reinvent their business and operating
models. A cloud computing platform
ready more quickly, and deliver on the end
automatically assembles and connects
virtual technology resources to support
goal of revenue acceleration.
business requirements. It does away with
the constraints associated with the actual
physical location of assets and the specific If you’re considering moving your test and • lexibility – Ideally, your provider’s
F
technologies they employ. This means development environment to the cloud, cloud platform should be able to support
you can design and deploy new business don’t underestimate the importance of multi-tier application architectures. This
services swiftly – and at a reasonable cost. selecting the right cloud service provider. will eliminate the need to re-architect
These attributes make test and Ideally, you should look for a provider your solutions before they can be moved
development a strong candidate for a with a sound track record and an ability to to the cloud.
move to a cloud environment. Test and ensure security and ease of management.
• lobal coverage – If your business
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development in the cloud is far more Preferably, it should be able to offer you
operates across borders, it’s important to
efficient. Your developers have access to the following features:
know your provider’s geographic reach.
a single set of virtual resources, via the • ser-friendly interface – A web-based
U
• rend analysis – If your provider can
T
web. They can provision resources simply user interface and a robust application
monitor your usage patterns, you’ll be
by specifying their needs. The provisioning programming interface will allow full
able to scale servers up and down to
capability within the cloud platform control and administration of your cloud-
ensure maximum cost-efficiencies.
immediately and automatically generates based servers and storage.
the required virtual environment. This These are exciting times for software test
• ranular control of resources – The
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means that new projects can be initiated in and development. Cloud is clearing the
ability to configure cloud servers on
a matter of minutes. No delays, no waste, way for businesses to make new products
the fly, allowing customisation of CPU,
and no incremental capital expenditure for and services market-ready more quickly,
memory and storage on servers without
every new request. and deliver on the end goal of revenue
having to create a new instance.
acceleration.
Because developers can access resources • mport, export and cloning of
I
when they need them, IT administrators operating system and software
are no longer a bottleneck to innovation. images – The ability to deploy images Why move test and
Nevertheless, provided you’re buying your on servers using an image library with
services from the right service provider, development to the cloud?
standard images.
IT can still retain visibility and control of • chieve faster time-to-market and
A
what services are being consumed and by • ecurity and controls – VLANs,
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greater flexibility for new products
whom, and implement internal charge- configurable firewalls, VPN and
and services
back mechanisms. encrypted data in-flight and at rest, self-
service configurations, user permissions, • ignificantly increase speed
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Cloud also paves the way for businesses to reporting and auditing to ensure your and responsiveness in test and
overcome the legacy challenges associated security and compliance posture isn’t development environments
with testing applications at large scale compromised. through self-service access, while
in a simulated production environment: reducing costs
there’s no contention with the production • erformance guarantees – Flexible
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service assurance commitments such as • ultiple service levels to address the
M
environment for resources. This means
network and server uptime guarantees, wide ranging requirements of the
that development teams can be more
response time guarantees and sub- application lifecycle
rigorous and thorough during the QA
and performance-testing phase, without millisecond latency guarantees will • uickly scale resources up or down,
Q
overshooting theirs budgets. This translates enable you to deliver reliable services to with usage-based billing
into a higher quality end-product. your internal users.
• upport for virtual environments and
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multi-tier application architectures
CS / DDMS-0905 / 02/12 © Copyright Dimension Data 2012 For further information visit: www.dimensiondata.com/cloud

4. opinion piece | Cloud Breathes New Life into Test and Development