The ITKO Blog: Service Virtualization and Application Lifecycle Optimization - CA Technologies

Pros and Cons of Application Testing in the Cloud

Well it seems we have a series of posts on Cloud Computing and Test environments to cover, as we've been seeing a lot of good background education in our research on the topic.

Jan Stafford recently posted on a conversation with Bernard Golden - author of IT bestseller, Virtualization for Dummies. Bernard is a strong advocate for virtualization and cloud computing technologies, but warned that it requires some new skills and has to be done right. In a brief video he said that application development is one of the areas were the cloud makes a lot of sense.

Bernard provided this example. A firm wanted to test their application and need 100 browser instances. In the old days it would have required 100 machines -- that would be a massive undertaking. Even with hardware virtualization, you would need 5 to 10 machines, and there would be some complex configuration issues. However, by putting it all in the cloud, they were able to sync up 100 virtual instances of the browsers and take them down over a weekend at a dramatic cost reduction.

However, that's just a web UI testing exercise. Bernard added that few development labs actually replicate the exact server and software environment as the target data center that will run the application in production. The cost of that set-up would be astronomical by conventional means, but that is starting to change. With Service Virtualization in a Cloud Environment, you can basically eliminate all of those downstream dependencies from the equation quite inexpensively.

In addition, development in the cloud allows you to scale up and scale down the application for testing of various load sizes without incurring hardware costs. The cloud can support more difficult testing requirements like load testing and scaling that many labs can’t scale to support. Finally, since many applications will be delivered through the cloud, testing them first this way makes sense.

To reap all these benefits, Bernard cautioned that there are several important decision such as finding the right cloud services provider. Software testers will have to acquire some new skills, and development teams have to be careful about integration with internal applications. They will also have to manage application lifecycle in the cloud. Many IT service providers have also made significant strides in delivering improvements in these areas.

Bigger New Fridges = Rotten Service Assets?

OK, file this under "food for thought." On second thought, maybe you shouldn't think about food and read this one.

Maybe you've heard news of a recent San Jose incident, in which the many leftover contents of a shared office refrigerator were emptied out for cleaning -- resulting in the evacuation of the office due to the smell and 7 people being hospitalized due to the toxic mix of fumes created from the cleaning process.

Fortunately everyone seems to be OK now. But it made me think of a disgusting, but kind of effective metaphor for shared computing environments. IT has focused much effort on making more room in the fridge, rather than better planning to decrease the need for a fridge.

At a desktop level, we already saw the complexity of systems increasing to follow Moore's Law. We are constantly increasing CPU speed, RAM, hard drive capacity, bandwidth, and the install size of the OS and many software packages seem to keep bloating to meet it.

In the enterprise, we saw the advent of SOA approaches - great if well planned, but nauseating for companies who started service-enabling everything and end up with JBOWS (Just a Bunch of Web Services) sitting around that couldn't communicate with each other.

Then came Virtualization - you could take 10 servers, or 100 system configurations, pack them up and deploy them as VMs on one machine with much less overhead. Awesome savings in hardware costs, but, eventually, like our fridge, you have a proliferation of many Virtual instances that can sit around past their expiration date.

Even with Cloud Computing you can experience this kind of pollution -- since provisioning costs are so cheap, even individual developers can throw an app into a Cloud environment with the relative ease of buying lunch on a credit card. What happens if some code is still referencing that instance, but the original owner forgets about it?

With today's flexible, decoupled software approaches, are we absolutely certain some part of a service or app we communicate with is not tied to some service down the line that has "gone sour?" And who judges which Services and virtual instances need to be turned off, when some dependencies aren't clearly labeled? "Whose, uh, thing, was this anyway..."

The answer to "rotten assets" lies in good architecture, a well thought-out plan of testing and rolling out services and Cloud instances around business needs that support the lifecycle (and not just convenience), and a strong governance approach that sets firm Policy (such as declaring expectations for use, expiration date, etc.), enforced with continuous validation that services are operating normally, whether real or virtualized. With some discipline, we have the means to keep our IT environments (and our shared office fridge, for that matter), a lot less cluttered.

Of course, you expect advice like that here. I just thought it was an interesting comparison and invite your thoughts on the concept!

Green SOA is Good

We have covered SOA’s role in green IT before on this blog, (see Making IT More Green and Saving Money at the Same Time Through SOA). Loraine Lawson provides an useful addition to the conversation with her post, SOA's Green ROI.

Lorraine sets the stage with the fact that today, over 70 percent of the SOA adoption rationale is business driven, versus only 30 percent in 2006. She adds that technology may never again be the driving force in the corporate decision process, but in SOA, it will always be the implementation mechanism. We have written that with SOA and many other tech efforts, going green and getting a better ROI are interconnected.

Lorraine goes on to cover the opinion of Deborah Grove, a green IT specialist, who has long been of the opinion that SOA is key to the long-term definition of Green IT. “Right now, we are picking up the 'low hanging fruit' by addressing the PUE (power usage effectiveness) of data centers’ power consumption.  However, looking at the entire IT food chain, ensuring that ecosystems of suppliers, partners, and customers are moving to an online collaborative style with less paper and less independent development of customized applications through the use of SOA means that fewer hardware pieces will be needed for dev and app servers.”

I certainly agree and automated testing and virtualization can play a significant role in reducing waste from the IT food chain. Lorraine points out that Verizon Wireless used SOA to green its IT infrastructure, reducing its hardware footprint by 95 percent. The company measured its ROI by reduced tonnage of hardware in the data center. However, the green of virtualization is not limited to hardware, as we have discussed here (see Guide to Service Virtualization in Enterprise Application Development – Part One of Six.) It is nice to see an increasing awareness of the green potential of SOA.

 

SOA Market Projected at $10 Billion or more by 2015

So much for the decline of SOA. Joe McKendrick reported on a Wintergreen Research projection that SOA will grow by 17% to rise from the current $3.3 billion to $10.3 billion by 2015. This is very consistent with the Research & Markets market 2008 estimate that putting the SOA infrastructure market as growing from $2 billion in 2007 to more than $9 billion by 2014.

We have been discussing the growth in SOA that we see from our perspective for some time. It is nice to see more validation of this perspective. And this is a conservative estimate.

Joe notes that AMR Research sees a much larger market ahead. They estimate the SOA market will grow from the current spending level of $28 billion to $52 billion by 2014. AMR analyst Ian Finley explained that their estimate is based on 600 companies globally, and covered a broader range of software and services than other estimates. I think this broader range of services is appropriate as SOA is dependent on many components, including governance, security, testing, validation, and visualization.

To focus only on SOA infrastructure does not provide the complete picture. There is a much larger pie in terms of the strategy, delivery and maintenance effort required to make SOA happen. It is like only counting sports ticket sales and not including the concessions, gear, TV rights, etc. Of course, this fact is not lost on the leading consultancies and SI partners, who have responded quickly with "SOA CoEs" (Centers of Excellence), coalescing this expertise for their SOA practices.

Joe concludes his post with a quote from the Wintergreen report that conveys some of the current and potential pervasiveness of SOA. "SOA reaches into every industry and every segment of the economy and represents a fundamental change in the way automated process is delivered to replace manual process. Service enabling offerings are a response to the fundamental change in IT, where enterprise competitive advantage is gained from having IT flexibility."

This is a game changer, and we are still only in the first half. Now, if we are going to call "SOA" something else by 2015, that's another matter...

MicroFocus Picks Up Former Heavyweight Borland for a Buck a Share

As reported in the tech news, (ex. Former heavyweight Borland bought by Micro Focus) “The Austin, Texas-based software maker said Wednesday that it has agreed to be acquired in its entirety by Micro Focus International in a $75 million cash transaction, unanimously approved by the boards of both companies.”

Borland last described itself as "the application lifecycle management company." It has been struggling and lost a key turnaround player when former CEO Tod Nielsen dropped off early this year to become VMWare's new CEO. Their glory days were mostly pre-web and some products lost out to Open Source upstarts.

cNet said that Micro Focus will acquire each outstanding share of Borland common stock for $1 per share. That sounds cheap even for a former legend in software development circles, but it's a “premium of 25 percent over the closing share price of 80 cents on May 5, and a premium of approximately 67 percent over the average 30-day closing price of 60 cents.”

Micro Focus is an enterprise software management company with a good international presence, and they also rolled in some of the quality and development management tools of Compuware into their portfolio at the same time. It hopes the Borland acquisition to help it gain greater market share, increase its customer base, and capture a larger penetration of the U.S. technology market.

The news did not say if the Borland name is going to be retained. Borland itself tried a rebranding from 1998 to 2000 using the name of "Inprise" before reverting to Borland for its greater name recognition. They also bought one of the original software testing companies, Segue, for $100M back in 2006, as they attempted to migrate from being a development tools provider, to a "software delivery optimization" vendor.

Another interesting year for acquisitions happening here. We certainly don't see the consolidation of established tech vendors slowing down any time soon.

Now is the Time to Get Your SOA House in Order

Joe McKendrick recently wrote about Using Downtime to Boost SOA. He refered to Kleber Bacili, CTO and founder of Sensedia, says "times like these may be the perfect times to get your SOA house in order.”" We certainly agree.

As Kleber said, the "recent 'SOA is Dead' debate has actually rejuvenated interest in service oriented architecture," He adds that if your budget has been tightened, this is a great time to clean up those foundering projects that never quite seem to get traction.

Kleber writes that this clean up can best be done implementing SOA governance initiatives with a well-planned and incremental approach. This allows you to streamline wasteful and unruly SOA projects, eliminating duplicated development through governance practices.

Indeed we can turn the tables on mere cost cutting and generate value here. There is plenty of opportunity to increase customer capture and retention, and deliver increased value by delivering the most critical business functionality faster (and with the quality to call it "delivered").

To do so, you need to validate that each release does indeed meet requirements, or you end up with a mark in the cost column instead. Virtualization of services can also eliminate costs while increasing agility, by eliminating the dependencies that can keep your development teams on the bench waiting for access to live services and incomplete systems from other parties.

Of course, if you do all of the above, your teams won't have any excuse for downtime anymore -- they'll be too busy delivering!

SOA's Practical Entry Points

SOA continues to move forward, and judging by the headcount at the latest IBM Impact SOA event we attended, it shows no sign of waning in popularity.

Eric Roch recently discussed a TechTarget survey in his post, SOA Survey Points to Practical Approaches. He wrote that the survey results indicate that the top SOA benefits organizations aim for are improved data integration (32%), enable legacy application integration (32%) and integrated disparate department applications (23%). These are very practical approaches to more cost effective data management and IT operations. Integration plays to SOA’s strengths, but also ups the stakes for automated testing, as we have discussed here a bit. You have more heterogeneity, more integration points and more change than ever - and we are far beyond the point where manual or UI testing approaches can succeed. These dependencies are also dynamic, so you need constant validation of business outcomes.  

BPM is the next most common SOA application, with an indication that its use will grow, as 38% of the subjects are planning to use it in the future. The survey also provides another data source to suggest that SOA is not dead as 49% of the respondents said their organization has one or more SOA projects under way. In addition, it is becoming more strategic as 60% characterize their current or future SOA projects as enterprise level as opposed to operating simply at the departmental/divisional level (21%), or single, isolated projects (19%).

We have repeatedly seen SOA used for cost reduction efforts around the integration of distributed systems and improvement of business processes. Eric calls this "SOA blocking and tackling," and says a great deal of it remains to be done. Automated testing and validation provides the means ensure that SOA meets business goals, while virtualization eliminates service constraints in the environment, so testing and validation can continue. 

Cloud Computing Enhances Enterprise Development and Test Groups

Dustin Amrheim of IBM recently posted on Five Ways Cloud Computing Strengthens IT: Enhancing Development and Test with Cloud Computing in the Cloud Computing Journal.

Dustin is a technical evangelist for IBM emerging technologies in the WebSphere portfolio. He first noted that much of the discussion about cloud computing covers the administrative and operational benefits. Then he adds that "sometimes lost in the cloud computing benefits discussion is how cloud computing enhances development and test groups in an enterprise."

Dustin then provides five ways this enhancement occurs which are worth remembering:

• First, there is self-service capability, a defining characteristic of cloud computing. You can easily commission and decommission computing resources as appropriate, which shortens the procurement process for testing teams, speeding up development and testing efforts.
• Second, there is enhanced resource availability. Cloud computing, through intelligent virtualization, usage tracking, and more, enables a better usage of the IT resource pool as a single, logical entity.
• Third, is increased environmental fidelity. Test and operation teams may have different conventions and configurations than development teams. Dustin notes that this can lead to unintended application behavior and delays in service delivery. Cloud computing offers a potential solution through the increasingly popular templatized solution stack. These solution stacks can include the application and entire environment down to the operating system. They enable all teams to see the exact environment in which the application was designed and unit tested.
• Fourth, hosted tools allow developers and testers to no longer worry with installing, configuring, running, or maintaining tools on their own machines. Instead, they can log into tools from any machine with a network connection and get to work. 


• Fifth, the four benefits above allow developers and testers to focus more on their core jobs. As a result, organizations can benefit from more developer innovation, increased test quality and coverage, and more.

These are all great features of the Cloud that we are seeing adopted by customers. You will see a lot more of our examples and perspectives on this blog covering how Cloud-based test environments are enhancing application lifeycles.

Service virtualization helps enable many of the above benefits for test and development environments. Third party services and monolithic systems are resistant to being encapsulated "in toto" and operating at realistic performance levels in many cases, so virtualization is a key aspect of completing the Cloud-based test environment circle.

Good material, check out Dustin's post for more detail.

Role of IT Architects and Architecture in BPM – MWD Survey

MWD advisors is running a survey on their blog (see "Is there room for architects and architecture in BPM?") exploring their audience's views on the role of IT architects and architecture in BPM. We plan to take the survey and encourage others to do this, as we are interested in seeing the results.

We feel that BPM exists as a discipline outside of any particular IT strategy, but as we have often mentioned in this blog, BPM can be a major driver of service-orientation, as well as governance and quality initiatives.

As the MWD blog points out, there is a lot of talk within the BPM technology vendor community about enabling customers to "scale up" their BPM initiatives. So they rightly suggest that IT architect involvement is likely to be a key factor in shaping how that happens in practice.

They have recently built relationship with the not-for-profit International Association of Software Architects (IASA), and asked them if they would help explore this question. This also want broader input, so we encourage you to participate in this survey and look forward to the results.