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

Webinar: No "free beer" in Service-Oriented and Cloud-based Applications?

We have harnessed the flexibility of readily available services, which can be assembled into business processes, and provisioned on Cloud-based, pay-as-you-need infrastructure. But despite our best expectations, there still is no "free beer" available in service-oriented and cloud-based applications for the enterprise.

What's raining on our parade? Someone has to pay to make sure that as we increase the number of distributed software components and processes, that the combined slurry of services will perform and function as expected by the business.

Face it, we are caught in a conundrum. While we can develop and assemble new business processes faster than ever from components, we also must deal with the fact that the rate of change and complexity of business software is only increasing. Every new service we connect to has the potential for failure. With that, the quality assurance effort and infrastructure cost of assuring reliable delivery of enterprise applications is also ballooning exponentially.

Let's turn the lights on, and discuss why the advent of SOA, BPM and Cloud Computing approaches, while a good thing on so many levels, also increases risk and cost. And maybe along the way, we will find some practices like robust automation and Service Virtualization that may get us closer to AFB (Almost Free Beer) -- readily available Virtual Test Environments, and increased reuse, so we can improve performance and quality with a much smaller incremental cost.

We are excited to present an upcoming "dual continent" webinar March 3rd for Europe and North America, featuring our partner Accenture's John McEvoy, head of EMEA testing, and our founder and Chief Geek, John Michelsen.

Webinar: "No Free Beer" in Modern and Cloud-Based Application Performance and Quality - http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_accenture_mar2010.jsp.

Hope to see you on the webinar, and bring your questions for John and John.

Chalk Talks: Validation 101 & 102

For this week's Chalk Talk installment, founder John Michelsen revisits what Validation means to today's modern application lifecycle. It is a crucial part of any well-governed software architecture, one that is still too often neglected, once the project test and release cycle is complete.

This first installment covers the basics of Validation ("Validation 101"):

Next, John talks about how we apply this practice using LISA Validate:

We are always looking for more topics, customer stories and problems we can address, so if you have a question for us to answer in our upcoming Chalk Talks, please comment here or contact us.

Chalk Talk: Service Virtualization 101

Time for the next installment of our iTKO Chalk Talk Series. What is Service Virtualization and how is it unique from existing forms of hardware virtualization? iTKO's John Michelsen provides an updated primer on the practice of virtualizing the behavior of constrained systems.

iTKO Chalk Talk - Service Virtualization 101 - John Michelsen (3:30)

We have found a greater understanding in the IT community over the last year of how Service Virtualization is a next logical step after the value companies already achieve with Hardware and OS Virtualization. Service Virtualization solves for the kinds of applications you can't easily replicate and drop on a VM for use while developing your own apps - they could be third party Services that you don't have control or access to, "big iron" systems like mainframes and systems of record, and even components that are under development.

 

2010 iTKO-TV "Chalk Talk" Series - Episode 1: Why LISA?

Yes, we're rolling with a new season of educational "Chalk Talks" on how companies can reduce software time-to-market and costs through the practices of Service Virtualization, Continuous Validation and more. For the first one, let's set the stage with an introduction to the high-level problem we are trying to address. Here, John Michelsen discusses "Why we built LISA" and the business challenge that is driving our practices.

Look for future videos from iTKO this season, including even more practices learned from the field. As always, we welcome your feedback and ideas on topics you'd like to see covered - so contact or comment to me here.