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November 14, 2008
Virtual Labs Migrate into the Cloud
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Almost everybody seems to agree that the cloud is not ready to house enterprise applications. But that does not mean enterprises cannot leverage the cloud’s myriad benefits. With increasing pressures to lower costs and increase efficiency, the practice of building virtual test labs in the cloud has companies drooling.
Far from the traditional practice of buying, provisioning and configuring the requisite hardware for testing a new application or testing the effects of software updates and patches, virtual lab automation lets users replicate production environments in the cloud almost immediately. Because the time to provision has been cut so drastically, virtual labs also help ensure the underlying software is up to date, not made irrelevant via patches rolled out during the time necessary to build a physical test bed.
“This whole notion of building a test lab, so to speak, in the cloud, or in the sky, is actually a brilliant move,” says Theresa Lanowitz, founder of analyst firm Voke Inc. Even more than pre-Y2K large-scale test labs offering users access to whatever configurations they needed, Lanowitz says testing in the cloud is “going to put … much more emphasis on the necessity of testing, and it’s also going to make testing easier. It’s going to eliminate a lot of bottlenecks, and it will, in the end, [raise] the service level agreements to allow people to deliver higher quality.”
According to Vishwanath Venugopalan, enterprise software analyst with The 451 Group, virtual lab automation also speeds time to market for new applications and creates self-sufficient developers. In fact, he says, the benefits of doing testing and development in cloud make inherent security concerns “less urgent” than in production environments. “A developer doesn’t need to depend on IT administration,” he explains, “they can pretty much whip out their credit card and spin up extra resources that would need in the short term.”
Running with It
Skytap, perhaps the undisputed leader in cloud-based virtual test labs, has noted the excitement around this trend and is taking full advantage. Skytap’s cloud computing services provides industry-standard infrastructure and a library of common open source and proprietary images. By replicating production environments, users can run applications in the cloud completely unchanged from the datacenter version. “It’s almost like an extension of your existing IT environment,” says Ian Knox, Skytap’s director of product management.
Venugopalan sees this as a major draw, as well. “For larger enterprises who are mulling around whether or not to take advantage of this cloud thing that everybody’s talking about, test and dev definitely is a very good proving ground,” he says. “Not just because you get the engineers in the trenches with the technology, but also because cloud offers the kind of flexibility where you can … more seamlessly make the transition between development and test and production.”
Skytap doesn’t believe its draw ends with on-demand infrastructure replication, though. Knox points out that users also can snapshot and save configurations for later use -- a capability that comes in handy when bugs are found. Flawed images can be saved until the appropriate personnel can come in and solve whatever issues exist. Users also can snapshot failed production environments and work out the kinks in the cloud.
Knox says Skytap stands above general-purpose clouds, and Amazon EC2, specifically, because Skytap allows a wide range of images; supports VMware; lets users define networks, mapping, host names, etc.; and has a very rich, drag-and-drop user interface. Test environments also must be more dynamic than production and reusable than production environments, says Knox, which is why Skytap prides itself on offering automation capabilities and a real self-service approach.
Another key to success in the cloud is enabling a broad class of customers to take advantage of your service. Knox says Skytap allows for all kind of testing -- from client-server applications to Web applications to patches -- and also facilitates on-demand training, sales pitches and product demonstrations. Additionally, Skytap has developed an expanding partner network that includes production hosting provider Savvis and cloud-enablement software vendor Appistry.
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