Today, organisations need more agile IT environments to match the highly dynamic and resource-intensive needs of the application development function, without compromising the performance of production workloads.

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

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

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

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