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

Why iTKO is Moving Gracefully to the Cloud

You might have noticed our site, our webinars, our advertising, and this blog, appearing with a renewed emphasis on Cloud Applications. Indeed, iTKO is "Moving Gracefully to the Cloud." But why now?

Our LISA software is already well-established as a way to Virtualize service behaviors to eliminate the constraints of unavailable or incomplete systems - and that is a next generation of Virtualization that is a meaningful, unique, and growing technology for us to be involved in.

And not to toot our horn too much, but we were already winning customers and awards years ago for Validating and Testing heterogeneous apps, including SOA, web services, ESB-based integration layers, enterprise Java, CORBA, what have you. We have every intention of continuously improving our coverage on that front.

So when we now talk about Cloud Apps, we do so quite deliberately. We aren't another company trying to hitch ourselves to the latest hype cycle, or give lip service to the latest sector. We only wanted a role in the Cloud story if we were a significant, important part of the vendor community, helping enterprises develop truly elastic, quality, high-performing Cloud Applications that meet customer needs. And all of the things we have done for "modern apps," SOA, business process validation, performance testing, and rich UI testing, are part of that journey to better development of Cloud Applications.

Here's a perspective on why iTKO helps companies "Move Gracefully to the Cloud" from our founder John Michelsen.

Your Middleware ended up in my Cloud!

I recently spotted a really good question from our friend Miko Matsumura on the eBizQ SOA/Cloud forums: "When will the cloud start creating deep impact in the middleware space and what segments will be affected first? Enterprise-to-cloud integration? Web 2.0 Application Infrastructure? Modern Internet B2B? Supply Chain?"

Here's what I had to say on the topic: To date I think there has been a generalization of Cloud as a deployment alternative for production servers, etc, when at first there are few enterprise-level, middleware-enabled business processes that can realistically survive in a Cloud without having "wires hanging out" - constraints of over-utilized systems that cannot be placed in the Cloud.

The pre-integration Cloud you mention - well, the Dev & Test Cloud is going to be a significant area of growth over the next 5 years. It is hard to develop and deliver apps for the Cloud, when there are so many dependencies not available in the Cloud - mainframes, 3rd party apps like SaaS, systems of record and other over-utilized and pay-per-use assets that Development and Test teams simply can't budget for, since their use is highly variable. We will need to find a way to take our middleware processes, and other external constraints, and make them available for integration purposes in the Cloud.

I've made it one of my little missions to better describe this phenomenon with a series of YouTube "chalk talks" there's a series of 4 videos. (See our Solution page for Dev & Test for all 4 videos on the right...)

There's a reason why current successes in the Cloud are kind of consumer-oriented, content-heavy apps, and not as much "big iron" multi-enterprise apps and middleware. Pre-Production clouds will be a necessity for Cloud Apps.

The fears that Cloud Apps are not bulletproof enough for serious middleware and integration use are unfounded - good software, wherever it is deployed, is still up to people: good architecture, elegant development, responsible security approaches and early testing. If we give them the means to do their jobs better in Cloud pre-production environments the success will follow.

Hidden Costs Off-the-Cloud: iTKO ChalkTalk

OK, here's the last of our little whiteboard series on Development and Test Clouds. What are some of the hidden costs that are not improved by the use of elastic Cloud Computing based images for dev and test environments? iTKO founder John Michelsen discusses how these off-cloud fees and constraints can hinder the value of Cloud application development.

Cloud applications -- at least most of the ones that would support any complex enterprise goal -- do not mean simply sticking a VM on EC2, or "doing your SOA" in a Private/Public Cloud. Before you deploy successfully in the cloud, you have to develop successfully in the cloud. Taken together, you can see how the challenges of:

1. constrained or unavailable services and images, or "wires hanging out" of the cloud;
2. volatility of demand from development teams, and constrained capacity of cloud-based application resources; and
3. hidden costs that are unacceptable for dev & test organizations

can really hinder the incredible gains in flexibility and cost savings we expected from moving our application development and testing lifecycles to the Cloud. We hope you enjoy these occasional video series, and welcome your comments or recommendations for future topics you'd like to see us cover.