The ITKO Blog: Application Lifecycle Optimization

Cloud Chaos for App Dev: Who Should Manage the Change?

We see a lot of enterprise IT teams saying "this year is the year we will take charge of our app dev environments and move them to Cloud."  Indeed, Cloud should empower these dev and test teams, and ease the time and expense of standard lab provisioning practices greatly. We have often said that the best, first application of Cloud is for software development itself.

But what happens if different teams select "Hybrid Cloud" approaches? Or, even scarier, what if the company migrates or evolves their overall Cloud strategy over time, as some of the first generation Virtual Lab Management (VLM) offerings are already being replaced by newer vendors and systems?

What this has done is create a new kind of Cloud Chaos for software development labs: one where you might have each software team spending time configuring and working with various Cloud lab provisioning approaches, instead of focusing on developing and testing functionality that delivers value for the business.

One major energy customer we worked with literally sent 600 developers and testers to Lab Manager training to learn how to provision VM systems - only to find that the next quarter, the IT operations group selected new Cloud infrastructure to replace that system!

We recommend an approach that does not dictate a particular Cloud hosting, lab server virtualization or management platform to give teams access to their software devtest environments - changing the "many to many" issue to a "one to many" capability.

By using LISA's DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) technology, a company can centralize the provisioning of all Cloud environments through one system, so multiple development teams can get access to all the labs they need - including the VLMs that deliver both server VMs and Virtual Services to simulate off-cloud or "big data" dependencies that cannot be conventionally replicated.

The DCM approach mitigates the consequences of change, and eliminates the need for development and testing teams to know exactly where, or how their Cloud environments are hosted and managed.

End dev and test consumers make a request to LISA DCM and instantly stand up a lab environment that is ready to go, with the systems, test data setups, and virtual services needed for distributed enterprise software development. They no longer need to focus on whether their environment is hosted in a Private cloud with CA's AppLogic, run as a Hybrid Cloud with AutoSuite or IBM solutions, or whether that capacity for a big Performance Test lab gets pushed out to Amazon or MS Azure and managed using VMware tools.

The main point of agile development and testing in the Cloud is to allow teams to focus on high-value activities -- meaning they are building and assuring software that meets business needs, instead of managing and setting up environments. The trend for all companies to move more software functionality to the Cloud will only continue. Let's embrace this high rate of change and increasingly heterogeneous future without sacrificing the productivity of software development.

We appreciate your questions and feedback on Cloud development and testing practices. Look for more articles from ITKO on this topic soon.

 

Forum: What was the biggest development for Cloud in 2011?

Participating again in the eBizQ forum on Cloud - and starting the process of looking back on a very eventful year for ITKO (and CA Technologies) in 2011, and picking our horses for what will happen in 2012.

The most obvious thing we saw in Cloud was a continued increase in consumerization and public level awareness, thanks to the usual suspects of Amazon, Apple, Google & Microsoft. You would be hard pressed to complete a download of consumer media or software these days without an invitation to claim your own Cloud spot for storing information or streaming your playlists.

But what about big business? How effectively did major companies in other industries embrace the Cloud? I just wrote a little piece on this here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/12/what-was-the-biggest-development-in-the-cloud-for-2011.php

The biggest development for the cloud this year was, well... development IN the cloud. The categorization of Cloud as "another place to host your apps" provided some incremental efficiencies, yes, but that's a pretty commoditized activity. We always knew the cloud could do more!

Setting up elastic, on-demand dev and test environments in cloud actually turns out to be the best first use case of cloud in the enterprise. As developers need to create new functionality and verify its performance and quality on top of layers of existing stuff, they all inevitably demand their own environments.

We've seen many enterprises that have dev and test environments outnumbering production environments by 7-to-1 or more - and with inconsistent accuracy, as there is a great deal of manual setup and maintenance involved in each of those instances. Let's harness all that excess computing power and pool it inside the company as Private clouds -- and for higher capacity or seasonal needs, instantly provision ready environments in Public clouds. [more >]

Hopefully that makes sense to our readers who live in the application development and testing world -- you are in the vanguard of Cloud simply because these activities are the most natural first step, and there are immediate infrastructure efficiencies to be gained right off the bat.

As for the rest of our predictions and a look back, stay tuned...

Forum: What Don't Companies Get about Cloud?

Recently participated in a forum thread from our friends at eBizQ: "What do companies still not get about Cloud Computing?"

A lot of this uncertainty stems from the old stalwarts of "Is the Cloud secure? Is it scalable?" -- and I think the panelists here debunk those fears pretty well. There are many well-secured ways to take advantage of Cloud, with almost unlimited scalability -- a lot more effort has been put into that at the big public cloud providers than most companies' own web and firewall strategies.

Now, let's get down to SLAs, or service level agreements in the public Cloud - many of which are starting to improve dramatically, while most still pretty much disavow responsibility for interruptions and downtime. Caveat emptor.

That said, Cloud is already happening, and is still going to happen - there is no way to escape the business appeal of provisioning IT resources and software in an on-demand basis. We are seeing many of the world's biggest customers first pooling resources within their own enterprise and rapidly obtaining a Private cloud, while thinking of Public cloud only for the highest capacity or "edges" of their applications.

Here was my take on this topic - read more at http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/08/what-do-companies-still-not-get-about-cloud-computing.php:

"Yeah we gotta do it. But who owns it, and who buys it?" Cloud as a term can cover so many departments and responsibilities within an enterprise.

Is it general corporate IT infrastructure (stuff like shared drives, backups, security & email)? Or is it the company's revenue-driving edge where business functionality is developed and delivered to partners and customers (commerce and differentiated service offerings)?

Often we are seeing larger companies with a more innovative bent hiring a "Cloud Czar" type executive or guru -- with a responsibility to overlay multiple organizations and map out a Cloud strategy. It's not always optimal, but at least then you have someone looking at the bigger picture.

Anyway, we recently had a great little meeting of the minds with some of our customers on this particular Cloud topic as well as the "Czars" and front-line job skills and talent pool of the future in our industry, so look for more interesting material on that coming soon.

"iqnite 2011" - That's Australian for Agile Development & Cloud Testing Oct 5-6

We're sponsors of an excellent upcoming event in Sydney, Australia this October 5-6 - iqnite, the Software Testing Summit.

We are excited to see many of our new customers present and speaking about using Virtual Service environments to get products to market with higher quality, and eliminating the constraints testers face in getting access to a valid, ready-to-run software lab with far less labor and infrastructure cost.

Our founder and "Chief Geek," John Michelsen will be presenting a session:

Thursday, Oct 6, 2:15PM: "Shifting Quality Left with Agile Collaboration and Cloud DevTest Labs"

To successfully build and release critical new customer-facing services faster, you need to think of Cloud as more than just another hosting option. As companies deploy Dev and Test Clouds, they quickly realize that cloud environments remain intertwined with dependency constraints on other "off cloud" systems in the enterprise. If not addressed, these constraints effectively limit the elasticity, flexibility, and overall usefulness of Dev and Test Cloud environments. This session will discuss how multiple teams can increase their agility and collaborate more effectively by leveraging virtual infrastructure in DevTest clouds. Time to market is accelerated when the lab infrastructure and data scenarios are in place on-demand, enabling you to “shift quality left” and test much earlier in the software lifecycle.

The last 2 years have seen an incredible amount of LISA activity from the Australia/New Zealand IT community, especially in fully embracing the concepts of Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud for most of the major Banking and Telco enterprises there. It's almost as if the whole continent waited for composite application architecture methods to sort themselves out before adopting service-orientation, then leapfrogged their global IT counterparts by moving straight into doing that distributed development and testing in elastic, on-demand Cloud labs.

Discount Registration Offer: As premium sponsors of this highly anticipated event, we can offer you and your colleagues $300 off a standard two day conference pass, or $100 off a one day conference pass. Be sure to use the promotion code "oziqnitekjross" when booking to secure this special price.

The show has keynotes from Google, Microsoft and Commonwealth Bank. The level of customer experience in solving some of the most difficult QA issues in the Cloud at this show looks great. Bring your questions for us, and hope to see you there!

Ready to Fly at TIBCO TUCON 2011 - Session

We're in the midst of preparing for TIBCO's big annual event, TUCON 2011 - September 27-29 - this year it's in Las Vegas at the Aria Hotel. It's been 3 years since our last appearance at one of these shows.

Our co-founder & Chief Technologist Ruston Vickers will be presenting Wednesday, Sept. 28th at 3:40PM as part of the show's Cloud Track: "ITKO: Make TIBCO Application Development Lifeycles Fly." [See the Cloud Track of sessions here.]

Ruston's session will cover 6 different customer examples - from an investment bank that avoided dangerous software problems by "shifting quality left" and continuously validating their TIBCO RV ESB systems and messaging, to a Telco that is developing and testing complex apps in Cloud environments at a huge cost savings and scalability advantage.

As you might have noticed, ITKO is now a CA Technologies company, and our theme for this show is "Where Agility Takes Flight." Fundamentally, our LISA products help TIBCO customers deliver critical IT functionality to market faster, cheaper, and with better quality.

You won't be able to miss our booth -- so if you hover around there, ask us how the union of LISA and CA product suites will help your TIBCO integration and Cloud projects get off the ground faster, and improve coverage across the lifecycle of applications, beyond LISA's innovative development, test, Service Virtualization and DevTest Cloud environments that TIBCO and its customers are already familiar with.

We're looking forward to this show. TUCON puts the customers first, and provides great insight into the latest practices happening in integration environments and partners swirling around this company. You can register for the event here: http://tucon.tibco.com/ and tell 'em we sent you!

News Today: CA Technologies to Acquire Privately Held ITKO for $330 Million in Cash

Things are heating up here in Plano, TX. And I'm not talking about another 100-degree summer day: ITKO has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CA Technologies.

Read the full press release here: "CA Technologies to Acquire Privately Held ITKO for $330 Million in Cash"

This is great news for our customers, partners and employees. At ITKO we have long believed maintaining a vendor-neutral approach is a requirement of any large-scale, heterogeneous enterprise IT environment, and CA Technologies shares our vision of supporting “any application, any technology.”

After hundreds of customer engagements over the last 5 years, we've learned our LISA suite, and our capabilities for Service Virtualization are most effective when used to eliminate the most difficult and costly constraints, and solve the world's most complex development, testing and integration challenges. With CA, we are now part of an organization with the reach and capabilities to truly solve the biggest problems enterprise IT faces.

Conveniently, we have seen many of our large enterprise customers also running CA's Application Performance Management (APM) solutions such as Wily Introscope and Net QoS to assure higher service and performance levels amid changing conditions. These joint customers are tackling large scale modernization and migration projects, and seeking new ways to move their applications to the Cloud with less risk.

You can still call us ITKO, and our team will continue to support customers with the service and strategic approach we're known for. But the overall picture of what customers can do to optimize the entire IT life cycle will get a whole lot bigger.

There are many more synergies and advantages to be realized from today's announcement, so look for future posts here on this blog (itko category: "CA") as well as reading pertinent articles on CA's very useful blog "Service Assurance Daily" over the coming weeks.

Moving Gracefully to the Cloud (Revisited - 1 Year Later)

Has Cloud development changed over the last year? It's about a year since we talked about "Moving Gracefully to the Cloud" here and put out our first papers on this topic, and a lot has transpired since then.

Companies embarked on multi-million dollar Cloud application projects, and encountered many of the roadblocks we discussed -- especially those "wires hanging out" of the cloud of unavailable or out of scope systems that are harder to provision or access during development.

But we've also managed to debunk a lot of the naysayers repeating the hackneyed complaints of "Cloud's not secure" or "Cloud doesn't scale" as we simply haven't found this to be true. The success of moving applications, and application development practices, to Cloud depends on People, Process, Technology - in that order, same as it ever was.

So here's John's Cloud "Chalk Talk" video, redux 1.23 years later:

 

We've seen several successful Cloud initiatives over the last year here, when companies adopt a comprehensive approach - sound architecture, considerations for performance and scalability, and most importantly continuous performance testing and validation to ensure that business outcomes are realized by the applications under development, every step of the way.

One leading insurer says they have already replaced more than 5000 development and test servers in their environment the first year by using Cloud-based labs with virtual services alongside virtual hardware. An Australian bank nearing the end of the DevTest Cloud's first year there is now predicting a 40% increase in efficiency across its entire application delivery team. All that represents a lot more functionality delivered successfully to market with the Cloud as an enabler. We'll continue to check in on these DevTest Cloud initiatives over the coming years here at the iTKO LISA Soapbox.

 

 

Video: Measuring Success in Customer Dev & Test Labs

Here's a new video commercial you'll see running in some of our upcoming channels about customer value. Obviously, there are a huge array of "test productivity" metrics like cost per test, cycle time per regression or peformance test suite that we continue to measure. However, with new capabilities of LISA like Service Virtualization, DCM and Pathfinder that have no direct equivalents out there in the market, proving customer value becomes paramount.

 

At iTKO we have a Business Value Assessment methodology to revisit customers at different points after adoption, and measure value delivered to date.

A big part of companies realizing value actually has little to do with our product, and everything to do with how aggressive the company is about scaling their efforts and defining a strategy to achieve the full potential value. This is why we have built out a very strong strategic Services arm and partner ecosystem - as the technology won't matter if the people involved don't adopt it with the appropriate methodology and commitment.

Often successully accelerating timelines or decreasing costs takes a change in mindset. For instance, if the company's IT leadership only thinks about Agile as something developers do while coding, and Testing as a point-in-time activity after deployment, they will have difficulties. The entire software lifecycle needs to be Agile -- and Testing isn't just for UAT, it's part of development, performance tuning, integration, every phase of that lifecycle. Sticking to the definitions of the past can be costly.

DevTest Cloud and LISA Service Virtualization: The Commercial

You may have read our book (well, a long paper) on SV and DevTest Cloud, or even seen the webinar we put on. But what about the commercial? Here at iTKO, promotion follows product, so here is your first peek at the new :60 spot for "Initiate the DevTest Cloud":

 

Stay tuned for even more killer video from the new iTKO-TV studios in Plano, which is to Dallas as Burbank is to LA. Which is to say it is mostly an endless expanse of malls and suburbs with some TV guys in it, but our new location is a great place to program -- and produce programming.

Two Strategies for Agile Composite Application Development - SV and DevTest

We just put up a new version of iTKO's Cloud paper "Service Virtualization and the DevTest Cloud" that helps clarify that there are two separate solutions we call Service Virtualization (SV) and DevTest Cloud, and while it makes sense to SV in its own right in any integration or testing project, there are also very good reasons to specificially use it for DevTest Clouds. Here's what we mean:

1. Service Virtualization (SV) is the practice of capturing and simulating the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems or services that constrain the progress of development and test teams.
   
   In essence, this is a "productizing" of the very time-consuming custom stub-and-mock process teams used to try to do for systems they couldn't get access to or easily copy or virtualize in their own enviroments. Obviously this capability has a very broad set of projects where it could be applied - it can speed up a step in a conventional waterfall-type software project, or really streamline things in an agile, SOA/BPM, decoupled approach. Virtual Services can act as stand-ins for functional and performance testing with almost unlimited repeatability, and little setup time and cost. But by the time you get to Cloud, teams invariably find they have even more dependencies, which calls for something new...
   
   
2. DevTest Cloud is a platform for doing software development and testing in a Private or Public Cloud. By nature, this Cloud-based environment allows the computing resources and infrastructure to be provisioned with complete flexibility - elastically consuming them in an on-demand way to allow the project to proceed with less overhead. A DevTest Cloud contains a Provisioning tool for deployment, and conventionally virtualized hardware and system capacity, but it also contains Service Virtualization capabilities.
   
   Without Service Virtualization, that Cloud-based lab would be subject to the same constraints as your in-house test lab environments: dependencies or "wires hanging out" that constrain teams when needed systems are unavailable or unready for development and testing. With Service Virtualization, these components can be simulated to respond with highly configurable response behaviors and times, along with a near-infinite capacity for high-volume performance validation.

I hope this helps explain why we needed to make the distinction in the whitepaper. Service Virtualization is useful to any complex, composite application development and test project, whether or not that happens in a Cloud-based environment. But within a DevTest Cloud, the practice of Service Virtualization is the catalyst that makes it a truly elastic platform without constraints.

Bridging the Cloud Divide with Development & Test Platforms

(With iTKO's guest blogger and Solution Strategist, Ken Ahrens) Your boss wants you to "do Cloud," but you’re not sure ... so what now? At least you are not alone in coming to grips with Cloud. We recently saw this article from one of our favorite columnists Joe McKendrick, covering a CA Technologies-sponsored survey of both IT execs and practitioners. Check it out:

ZDNet Service-Oriented Blog: "Cloud divide: senior executives want cloud, security and IT managers are nervous"

There are a number of interesting data points about Cloud adoption in the article that made us think:

1. 44% of executives name security teams as primary opponents of public cloud (27% private)

First of all, your leading public cloud provider should have more resources exclusively dedicated to "perimiter security" than your team can muster, and they should be able to address many of the typical concerns of external access like firewalls, authentication, etc. So the real question is: how securely designed are your applications themselves?

This is a great reason to start by moving Dev and Test activities to the cloud.  In most mature enterprises the non-production systems shouldn't be using real customer data anyway.  What better way to ensure the protection of the data? How about by first moving the desensitized or "clean" data into virtual data models that meet the needs of dev & test teams; and then running lots of analysis to make sure none of the "safe" information gets out during the process, or in deployment through use of the software.  This would be a prudent 2-step approach to the problem. We outline aspects of this in our latest paper on "Service Virtualization and the DevTest Cloud."

2. 52% of IT managers fear job losses

Although we don’t normally comment on this kind of thing, it’s interesting to think that this would be a viable concern.  The point is that employees should move up the value chain, and concentrate on providing more vital services to their employer, and therefore its ability to deliver for customers.  Managers should be focusing on how much more agile they can make their teams in rolling out new features and functionality to the market, and Cloud approaches should be malleable to these efforts.

3. 80% of all enterprises (and 92% of large enterprises) have at least one cloud service

Shouldn’t this stat vindicate the security and control concerns?  If we’re already doing Cloud, we can point to a project to determine if control has been lost or data compromised.  These case studies should be reviewed seriously to determine the correct course of action for the next round of services. We just talked about this "Cloud Creep" in a previous blog -- so if it’s already happening, you’d be much better served to figure out how to get on board.

4. Mature adopters of cloud are already virtualizing.

Not a big surprise here that once you have grips around server virtualization, moving to the cloud should be much more straightforward.  The two naturally fit together. But all this cloud infrastructure puts even more of a strain on key "over utilized" systems that cannot be virtualized, especially in a Cloud environment. For more on this, see our paper on "The Next Frontier for Virtualization: Over-Utilized Systems." 

What about all of those mainframes, ERP systems, third party service providers, and large databases?  How will they cope with additional systems looking for access? That's where Service Virtualization is an applicable practice -- productizing the practice of simulating those over-utilized systems is also a way to bring "off cloud" and out-of scope systems into scope.

What are your Cloud concerns? We only covered a few of the points in the article, so let us know and we'll talk about them here. Thanks to Joe for the overview and CA for making these empirical survey results available.

On the Forums: Is Cloud Computing Now a Business Necessity?

How widespread is the use of Cloud now, and is it a business imperative, or just another deployment option? We recently commented on this on our favorite forum at eBizQ:

 http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2011/01/is-cloud-computing-now-a-business-necessity.php

I thought Lori MacVittie's comment that "... the "business" doesn't need cloud computing. It needs applications." was very appropriate. True, business isn't usually driving cloud adoption. The IT side of the business has the most immediate gains to realize, having to offer more computing capacity while responding to budget pressures.

However we are seeing two current trends that are very real. Some major companies have identified Cloud as more than a different hosting option, or another word for leveraging somebody's SaaS applications. They are mandating that any business activity, including not just using functionality, but building and testing the applications themselves, must happen in the Cloud.

On top of that, you have what Alain Rap calls "cloud creep," which is the inevitable march of individuals within companies going ahead and using Cloud to get around administrative and procurement issues. Here's what John said about it:

It'll be like Palmolive. You're already soaking in it!

I would say right now about 20% of Global 500 companies identify full Cloud-enablement as an important strategic initiative. But what about the rest?

It may not be defined now as a necessity, but for many companies it is already becoming a reality - you have individual developers and business unit heads, tired of a multi-month IT cost justification for provisioning new servers and elastic capacity to test and run their apps... and many of them are just going out with their credit cards and purchasing some Cloud capacity or leveraging business services on their expense accounts.

What do you think?

Virtualization or Cloud? Both or Neither? Why or Why Not?

Recently commented on eBizQ's Forums about a question that on first read seemed rather silly: Is it better to use Virtualization for some business apps rather than the Cloud? Here's what I said about it:

"It's hard to picture how it is better to use one than then other, when both could be perfectly applicable. I would expect virtualization to be a commonly accepted precursor to leveraging cloud-based environments for applications."

The discussion here, especially in posts by Ian and Lori, does a great job of making sure we aren't lulled into thinking of Virtualization and Cloud as either/or propositions. You are talking about two totally different things. But let's play devil's advocate and discuss how they are not very different.

1. Near-Ubiquity. Virtualization, as in hardware/desktop VMs and system images, is now par for the course. And we expect Cloud Computing as defined here to also become a major part of every enterprise IT strategy - in fact, we think it truly arrived this year. Therefore, both are present in most major IT shops already.

2. Complimentary Value Proposition. Obviously, you have compelling reasons to do both - I like Satoru's quip on "selfishly" utilizing several different Virtual images on an Amazon EC2 Cloud environment - perfect for quickly launching or freezing several different versions of his software lab depending on their reliability or versioning needs. To an extent, you can use both for similar value reasons: cost efficiency, more optimal use of computing resources (and/or capacity), system flexibility or elasticity... again, different things but similar value props.

3. Constrained by External Factors. Lastly we have discovered that Virtualization and Cloud are most similar in what they CAN'T optimize conventionally. Almost the same behavioral rules apply here - if it's a system or server you have access to and control over, it is easy to image as a VM, and also logical and cost-effective to deploy it in a Cloud. If you are dealing with an Over-Utilized (high traffic and size) system, or one that is Out-of-Scope (external to your dept. or a major service outside your company's authority), BOTH hardware virtualization and Cloud quickly become ineffective or constrained. Here's what I commented on that:

"There will still be some over-utilized business app resources that are also resistant to both - it doesn't make sense to try to replicate a 2TB mainframe as a VM, or stick it in a public cloud..."

A solution to the above constraints for both, is a technology we call Service Virtualization - this is now a very mature solution space and something we've been discussing for more than 3 years  here, since we introduced LISA Virtualize product features. Virtual Services provide a companion to VMs, and simulate the behavior and performance of those Out-of-Scope items, so when and if you do deploy both in a Cloud, you truly get an elastic, constraintless environment for software development and testing purposes.

John - Talking Cloud Development & Test on TMCnet

Here's a clip from my trip last week to Sys-Con's Cloud Expo 2010 West - I had the chance to catch up with TMCnet Executive Editor Erin Harrison for this interview about DevTest Cloud, and the trends we are seeing at this event.

Enjoy:

 

Here's to a continued - and inevitable - maturing of this sector of the Cloud market. Much of the remaining cost and constraint of IT is in properly equipping very expansive and widely distributed dev and test teams with ready environments that support needed scenarios.

 

Notes from Cloud Expo 2010 - This will fly...

Just got back from Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara, CA, and this year's event was very much a coming of age for Cloud. Attendance and expertise levels were high. Two years ago when I audited a Cloud conference, the subject matter and vendors present seemed to be catering to an MIS or webmaster-level audience - largely a sideshow to the SOA/Virtualization audience concerned with moving servers off the racks of their data centers to save some incremental network and hardware costs.

iTKO's "Chief Geek" John Michelsen talked Tuesday morning on "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Applications" and it was standing room only, with plenty of good audience interaction - a lot of developers and testers in the audience from a show of hands.

If you want to see the content from this session, and a little more specific to LISA DCM, I suggest you attend the iTKO webinar Wednesday, Nov. 10th, 1pm CDT: What Makes a DevTest Cloud Fly? (And what is the value?)

We are seeing a maturing of the space. Hardly anyone here is trying to "define Cloud" anymore. Not as many irrational fears about "is the Cloud secure? Can it perform?" Even in infrastructure terms, the Cloud offerings here are more specialized, for instance, leveraging private Cloud storage for content management uses, or offering industry-specific services atop cloud infrastructure. From my perspective talking to attendees on the Expo floor, people are looking for ways to develop business functionality to take advantage of Cloud, and not the other way around. Also it was good to see more reporters and analysts stopping by.

John also participated in the CTO Round Table that evening, and he will cover that discussion in an upcoming post.

Speaking of Cloud: Webinar 11/10 and Cloud Expo 2010 Sessions

This is not just a big week for political pundits - it's a huge one for technology pundits, and the topic of hype and speculation is, of course, Cloud.

We're heading out to the Cloud Expo 2010 in Santa Clara today, where we are hoping to hear less hype, and more about companies getting down to practical value with Cloud. I'll be back to my roots meeting people on the show floor, and iTKO's Chief Geek/Founder John Michelsen will be making three appearances at the convention on Tuesday, Nov 2.

  John's appearances at Sys-Con Cloud Expo 2010:

1. Breakout Session: Tues 11/2 - 9:55-10:40 AM: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Cloud Applications"
   What is preventing enterprises from realizing the elasticity and cost savings expected from Cloud applications? Successfully delivering complex apps in distributed Cloud environments requires a means for dealing with the constraints of systems and services that are unavailable to development and testing teams. The DevTest Cloud is an essential platform that provides the ability to provision development and test labs, consisting of Virtual Machines (VMs), Virtual Service Environments, and automated regression and performance test servers in the Cloud.
2. Demo Session: Tues 11/2 - 5:00 - 5:20 PM: A product demonstration of LISA DevTest Cloud Manager (DCM) for provisioning elastic, on-demand virtual testing and development environments.
3. CTO Power Panel: Tues 11/2 - 7:15-7:45 PM: John joins other Cloud development leaders in this CTO-only panel in the general session room.

All of this activity leads up to a DevTest Cloud webinar we are putting on next week:

iTKO Webinar: What Makes a DevTest Cloud Fly? (And what is the value?)
November 10, 2010 1:00pm - 2:00pm Central

So your company is moving its software development and integration activities to the DevTest Cloud. What are some of the new practices you should expect to be able to do in this environment, and what are other companies doing successfully right now? The DevTest Cloud is an essential platform that provides the ability to provision enterprise development and test labs, consisting of Virtual Machines (VMs), Virtual Service Environments, and automated regression and performance test servers in the Cloud. Examples of utilizing DevTest Cloud for performance tuning, regression testing and continuous integration will be covered in this insightful session.

A DevTest Cloud provides an essential platform for enterprise software development and testing. Whether the Cloud infrastructure consists of pooled on-premise computing resources, or public Cloud capacity that is provisioned as needed, the end result is the truly on-demand, elastic capacity we expected from the Cloud, at a fraction of the cost of dealing with the hard constraints of traditional dev and test environments.

Registration is open to iTKO LISA customers and subscribers. Sign up here and we’ll send you the meeting information: http://www.itko.com/resources/webinar_devtestcloud_nov2010.jsp

Stay tuned for more updates from iTKO at the Cloud Expo.

News from IBM on Development & Testing in the Cloud

Good news came out today from our partners at IBM that highlights many of the initial customer successes we're seeing for the discipline of moving software development and test processes to the Cloud - what we at iTKO refer to as DevTest Cloud.

The solution offering, called IBM's Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, encompasses several technologies and services from IBM and its partners. iTKO's LISA Virtualize technology is a critical catalyst of the solution, as LISA's Virtual Service Environments (VSEs) enable the virtualization of constrained systems and performance labs needed to make the Cloud a truly elastic, 24/7 ready resource for parallel dev & test.

You may remember two major announcements this year we've discussed on this blog - iTKO's role in IBM's Application Virtualization strategy, and our integration of LISA as a Ready for Rational solution enabling end-to-end testing and virtualization.

Key features listed in today's release "IBM Expand Cloud Offerings for Software Development & Testing" included:

• IBM Testing Services for Cloud - application virtualization: Clients rapidly create multiple virtual test environments customized for each development and testing team.  By providing testing teams with 24/7 availability without dependencies on back-end systems and data stores, the service gives testing teams the ability to test more thoroughly throughout the life cycle without worrying about data or service availability. A North American company using this service experienced a 22 percent reduction in the Function and System Test cycle and a 100 percent return in ROI within 90 days.
• IBM Testing Services for Cloud – performance testing: Brings together automation and performance testing tools to significantly reduce time by as much as 50 percent, the service provides flexible, utility-based testing that delivers on-demand performance testing, and offers robust, large-scale performance testing services to enterprises, via Cloud hosting.  This service identifies defects earlier in the cycle where they are less expensive to fix and eliminates performance-related bottlenecks.

How do customers start capturing the value above, and start utilizing Cloud Development & Test solutions like this today?  We recently wrote this case study with a major Telco customer that was an early adopter of our joint vision of VSEs and Application Virtualization in the Cloud, and they have certainly seen even more returned value over the last 6 months.

News Today: LISA Across the Software Lifecycle at Australia and New Zealand Bank

Today's press release represents a very significant customer announcement in a very important geography for iTKO. Several leading institutions in Australia & New Zealand are selecting LISA for virtualisation (proper English spelling, of course) of their software development and testing environments, as well as end-to-end testing and validation activities.

We are particularly excited to announce this new deployment at ANZ Bank via today's press release:

iTKO LISA Software deployed in Asia Pacific
Australia and New Zealand Banking Group selects iTKO’s LISA Testing, Validation and Virtualisation Solutions

Here's an excerpt from the release: “After an evaluation process that considered our existing technologies and future IT objectives, we ultimately decided that iTKO’s complete LISA Suite would reduce risk, cycle times and costs across our development and testing cycles,” said ANZ Head of Testing, Environments & Change CoE, Technology Global Solution Delivery, Marcello Martino. “We believe that LISA will allow us to automate more activities, improve our use of existing infrastructure, enhance collaboration, and help us to better meet our customer needs.”

This bank is representative of modernization going on in technology groups in the entire APAC region. ANZ is making huge leaps in modernizing their SDLC lab environments, and collaborating with delivery partners, through virtual services, validation and governance technologies. We think this is only the start of advances we'll see coming from down under as adoption of Cloud-based dev & test practices accelerates.

Related coverage on this news:

• Computerworld.au: ANZ picks up in-house testing platform
• ITWire: Westpac and ANZ float cloud testing
• Global Services: ANZ Picks Up In-house testing platform
• Finextra: ANZ and Westpac tap the cloud for testing
• MIS Asia (Ovum perspective): Calling retail banks: boarding on your flight to the cloud has now commenced

The World Finally Seems to Get the DevTest Cloud Idea

We're going to continue this week with more interesting things we've heard customers and partners say about best practices for employing DevTest Cloud practices to solve big, hairy software problems.

Last week we were at STARWEST 2010 in San Diego, and the attendance was about double last year's draw. More than 250 QA professionals stopped by, and many of the managers said "I was specifically asked to find out how to virtualize my test lab" or "We are looking for a way to take our SDLC to the Cloud" or "I know we are moving to a federated Cloud solution for our defense projects and we need to be involved" - referring to the government's Forge.Mil initiative we discussed here recently.

Heady stuff, because in previous years most of the questions at these shows were about testing specific protocols and interfaces such as web services, web 2.0 UIs or TIBCO, etc.

From our bizdev man Scott - he made one call to a potential customer, and he was already thinking DevTest Cloud. Check out an excerpt of what this guy sent out to his team, telling them all to get familiar with the concept -- before he'd even finished the first page of our recent whitepaper about virtualization in the DevTest Cloud:

If you glance at the executive summary of their white paper, they seem to address the issue of the various independent systems required to make up a test/development environment. From my high level discussion, I learned that they do this via simulation rather than reproduction of the external system. Having a solution to simulate external dependencies would be of great benefit for repeatable tests and to quickly reproduce a whole environment. I think it is very interesting.

All of the aspects that make Cloud enticing - elasticity, on-demand resources, provisioning as a "utility," multi-tenancy and low-cost capacity, make DevTest Cloud especially interesting, because it truly allows teams to work in parallel, while avoiding the constraints of huge costs and delays created by waiting for unavailable or live system dependencies to be available in their environments.

We too find it very encouraging that when enterprise IT thinks Cloud, they are starting to also think of software Development and Test as an essential function of the Cloud, rather than merely Cloud Computing as a deployment option.

 

What's the Best First Use of Cloud? iTKO on eBizQ Podcast.

Over the course of this year we have had an increasing number of customers who have made a commitment to "go cloud" as a strategy to realize flexible, on-demand computing capacity and IT cost savings in a broad sense. You would assume that we would also see some huge success stories in Cloud, but they are still waiting to be seen.

I just did a Podcast with eBizQ's forum editor Peter Schooff called "What's the Best First Use of the Cloud?" to discuss where companies could start their Cloud efforts to realize the maximum benefit for the minimum outlay, specifically in the software development & test area. http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/2010/09/whats_the_best_first_use_of_th.php

What stymies Cloud? It's not the negative hucksters who make unfounded complaints about the lack of Security or Performance in Cloud. An application that is poorly secured and tuned will be a problem whether or not it is deployed in cloud. No, we are finding the biggest issues to real cloud development are the elements of Cloud that are still external to your control or scope.

Don't just "stick your apps in the Cloud." Make your apps, integrate them, test them and tune them in a DevTest Cloud, where all of the external dependencies, data and configuration are ready anytime.

2010 - The year we met DevTest Clouds...

Today we released a new version of the whitepaper: "The DevTest Cloud: An Essential Platform for Application Development" -- and aside from looking really good (kudos to the designers), it contains a whole lot of new thinking about how we should best bring enterprise software development into the Cloud age.

If your enterprise has a Cloud initiative brewing, there is not a higher value lever to pull right now than optimizing development and testing activities in the Cloud. You should find out what DevTest Cloud platforms can do to bring the elasticity of Cloud to the software lifecycle: on-demand dev & test environments, with ready capacity at exponentially lower costs.

This is just a start, as we believe 2010 will be the year of the emergence of DevTest Cloud platforms. Leading vendors such as IBM, VMware, Citrix, Amazon and others are delivering elastic, on-demand infrastructures that are more than just places to host applications. We'll continue demonstrating how enterprises will be able to build their own DevTest Cloud platform that leverages these solutions.

Look for more blogs from us on this vital practice, as well as new videos, new press and articles, customer stories, and an appearance from John at the upcoming Cloud Computing Expo 2010.

You can get a copy of this paper, and find all the latest DevTest Cloud resources from iTKO here: http://itko.com/cloud.

SearchSOA Editor's Notebook: DevTest Clouds

A little while ago our CEO Shridhar Mittal, and IBM's Cloud executive Walter Falk had a chance to catch up with SearchSOA (TechTarget) editor Jack Vaughan. Jack wrote about our conversation on development & testing in the Cloud in his Reporter's Notebook:

Reporter's Notebook: "Push and Pull in Software Development"

Our discussion focused on how development & testing groups are addressing the increased costs and complexity of today’s distributed applications, by trying to move quality left in the lifecycle. However, there is an exponential increase in the amount of dependencies in the software lifecycle -– systems that are unavailable, costly to access, or simply not finished yet for development purposes.

This is where what IBM calls "Application Virtualization" comes in, with development and testing representing the most valid use cases for building applications in the cloud. This offering (see the post on the joint IBM/iTKO AV offering from May, and the IBM Rational news from June) paired LISA's form of Service Virtualization of unavailable or constrained 3rd party services and systems, with a full suite of ALM development and testing solutions, and best practices from IBM's services and technology groups.

Dev & Test are the most obvious places for larger enterprises to start moving to Cloud. With so many existing systems and multiple teams involved in integrating new software functionality, the virtualization of constraints as a "DevTest Cloud" is the key to productivity in the organization.

The question here is not "Where do I host this to save some costs or have additional system capacity?" That is important, but in this instance we are first asking: "Where is your software being built, and how efficiently is that delivery process meeting customer needs?"

This solution can be offered on an IBM Cloud, or other leading cloud infrastructure providers, but replacing some hardware is not the primary significance. It does not matter where the DevTest cloud resides: Public, private or a “personal” cloud on the user’s desktop, what’s important in our view, is that it provides an unconstrained platform, with dependencies resolved for successfully developing, testing and delivering applications that are ready for a service-oriented, or Cloud-based future.

News Today: Enabling the Defense Community in the Cloud with LISA Virtual Dev & Testing

Today iTKO issues a press release about our support for Forge.Mil, a collaborative software environment for the U.S. Department of Defense. As many of you know we have been following the dedicated work of DISA (DoD’s IT arm), and LISA-enabling their leading partners (such as Harris, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, and many others) over the last 5 years, as a part of certifying and test services that are contributing to deliver functionality to the warfighter.

Here's the official press release out today:

Optimized Software Virtualization, Test and Validation in the Cloud for U.S. Department of Defense

DISA's Forge.Mil Initiative to Offer Shared TestForge Services in the Cloud, Enabling Faster Delivery of Capabilities to the Warfighter Through Software Release Efficiencies

Most discussion of Cloud to date is focused on either the infrastructure itself (the actual servers and running VMs, or IaaS - Infrastructure as as Service), or the applications themselves that are hosted on Cloud (for instance a SaaS-based offering). But how do we successfully deliver today's complex applications, when all the dependencies and constraints of unavailable systems drag teams down? Nowhere would this challenge be more evident than in Defense, where the work of many distributed teams must go on, while at the same time critical live systems must be secured against the volatility of testing and development.

Forge.Mil contains a Cloud-based community called TestForge - with a built-in Platform as a Service (PaaS) for Virtual Service Environments, so all development and test contributors can have 24/7 availability without impacting live systems, and create new levels of efficiency. The Forge.Mil initiative (which includes TestForge, SourceForge as well as providing a cloud platform for other aspects of software lifecycle management) proves that in many aspects of IT governance and innovation, federal agencies continue to lead the way over the private sector. Optimizing software in this sense can not only save time and money, but lives in the field. Thanks to everyone who has helped drive this vision.

Agile Cloud Development: Go Forth and Do the Wrong Things, Faster

Horror stories abound in the cloud... and fearful pundits rule the day, questioning the viability, security, or unknown costs of the enterprise adopting Cloud. But the reality is, it is going to happen anyway. Why? Because developers and testers can afford to adopt it on an as-needed basis without a capital expense mandate, and cloud allows software teams to fail faster.

Cloud is not just some "cheaper pay-per-use place" you deploy your apps. It is the culmination of distributed software development processes. The ideas of SOA, BPM, loose coupling, all play into the design of enterprise software for Cloud.

The beauty of developing and testing in the Cloud is not guaranteed success. It is that we can fail far faster, and at a much lower cost. One of our partner sales friends recently sent me this excellent little speech from CSC's expat Mark Masterson (check his blog here):

(Uh, whoever that bank is at about (13:40) in this clip, who lost $500M+ waiting for teams to have sequential access to test environments, needs a Virtual Services Environment to not only provision infrastructure with VMs, but also simulate those off-cloud dependencies in far lower cost for Cloud.)

I like what Mark is saying about companies being obsessed with reducing the risk of failure rather than the cost of failure. They spend all of their energy with a balance-sheet mentality - ensuring that any expenditure has less risk of failure, and in turn, delay projects and limit their options. Driving down the cost of failure is what enables real agility - allowing companies to delay their decisions to deduce the most optimal directions.

As a musician I make a point out of failing faster. The reason for practicing with others is not to play the music perfectly - instead, it is about going for it, and getting all the bad notes and bad ideas out, before you invest in recording or playing live. The same goes for software. If you had unlimited, low-cost ability to try options, rather than having to predict the one with the least chance of failure, you would find the best one much quicker.

Cloud is going to be the reality of distributed enterprise applications, because no matter what the pundits say, before it is a deployment option, it is an optimal platform for agile software development and testing. So get out there, and fail faster!

Mind the Development Gap in Virtualization and Cloud Approaches

We recently had the chance to catch up with Eric Knipp, who happened to be in the area (yes, we have astute local Gartner analysts in Dallas, and no cowboy hats on in the room). He made an interesting point: that the way we describe Service Virtualization was really oriented toward the "Design Time" aspect of a development environment.

That is definitely a "development gap" that needs to be minded. When I read and hear articles about new development processes, it seems like there is a wide gap between the developer's code itself (addressed by Agile, scrum, source control, some ALM) that extends all the way through integration and testing, and continues until Deployment (where the software assets exist in Runtime).

As an industry, we look at Virtualization and Cloud as deployment frontiers. That's cool, but it represents a small portion of what could be done with the two technologies working together to eliminate that development gap, before we step off into it.  

We are increasingly finding that as development becomes more distributed across small teams and separate domains, the number of pre-production development servers and test beds balloons. Whether that deployed app is on a regular web server, or a Cloud-hosted VM, it still seems like we are leaving a bigger proliferation there. It might not seem that big at first, but few real enterprises haven't already started leveraging these distributed computing resources now.

If Cloud Computing and Virtualization are all about replicating or replacing production servers, then why would a top banking customer replicate more than 1100 services and systems with Virtual Services instead of letting them keep making copies of Virtual Machines (VMs) on their network, and later, in their private cloud solution?

Short of longing for the old days of monolithic, centrally controlled systems with 1 production environment and a couple test and staging environments... business won't let IT go back to slow releases - our agility is also creating a new burden in pre-production. Of course, this applies for larger enterprises - there are many instance of new companies who are building functionality "for the Cloud" that is limited in scope and integration requirements, starts fresh, and thus, does not have as much of a burden here.

So here's my question again: If you had to count up the instances of pre-production vs. production "environments" and servers, would the pre-prod outnumber the production by 10-1? 100-1? Be honest and think about all those dev and test servers you don't know enough about to shut down... and think about all the partners that must have their own as well.

And, mind the gap before you step off that platform!

Pooling Major Software Costs in Clouds Across Large Enterprises: Will it work?

Found an interesting article from Bob Evans in a recent InformationWeek - major financial firms are working up a cloud consortium to try and negotiate down some of their IT costs by pooling resources. Of course, we are familiar with this concept in government requisitioning, group payer negotiations for healthcare... but how will it work for IT?

"Global CIO: Global Banks Form Consortium To Counter HP, IBM, & Oracle"

True, if anyone has the clout to push the big software vendors to offer them economies of scale, it's banks like Bank of America and Deutsche Bank, and if this were going to happen anywhere, it would be in the Cloud. However, while there may be commonalities between large banks, in terms of the types of workflows and compliance issues they need to support, the enterprise software packages they are likely to be running are very seldom standard one size fits all applications.

I think like many seemingly disruptive changes, this strategy will have more utility for a new class of "shared utility" types of Cloud-based software that represents a small percentage of functionality that can be shared across global banks. This will be like a "toe in the water" to gauge the temperature for a bigger plunge later.

For more strategic operations, the inherent uniqueness of financial systems in different countries, and even global competition, will still require custom purchasing and large service contracts from the software giants, and the SIs that support them. I'll certainly be watching this story in the coming few months to see how it plays out.

News Today: iTKO Teams with IBM for Application Virtualization in the Cloud

News flash (5/6/2010) - today from IMPACT 2010 we announced a new solution offering with our partners at IBM. Known as IBM Application Virtualization Services (or "AV"), this solution takes what LISA does well (Virtualization, Validation, Testing, Defect Resolution), wraps it with IBM services and technology, and makes this offering available on premise, or through an IBM Cloud platform, to solve critical customer needs.

• Press Release: "iTKO Teams with IBM on New Cloud Service to Help Clients Rapidly Deploy Applications"
• Download the Datasheet: "iTKO/IBM Application Virtualization"
• For more, see our Solution page for Application Virtualization

AV presents a highly differentiated solution to our joint customers, a solution that will revolutionize the way companies with distributed teams and technology components can build their applications. It's all part of a vision that goes beyond considering where software is deployed, to solving the root challenges of first successfully doing Development and Testing of that enterprise software where it will live in the Cloud.

eBizQ Podcast: Should you take a "Big Bang" Cloud Approach?

I recently had the chance to catch up with eBizQ's Forum Editor, Peter Schooff -- and record a podcast about iTKO's perspective on Cloud Application development. To us, Cloud Apps are the ultimate form of modern, distributed enterprise applications - they leverage everything we've done from service-orientation, virtualization, business process management and SaaS to date.

I think Peter asks some very salient questions - take a listen, read the full transcript of the interview (cool feature of their site), or download the mp3 Podcast here:

ebizQ Podcast: Should You Take a 'Big Bang' Approach to the Cloud? iTKO Explains

Cloud Apps are the apps themselves - not the hardware (or virtual hardware) they are hosted on - which are unique from the well known practice of Cloud Computing, which addresses and commoditizes computing capacity in deployment. We are especially excited about how developers and testers will be able to use Cloud App platforms to revolutionize their efficiency and reduce costs throughout the software lifecycle, so I hope that comes across in my interview.

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.

More About Dev & Test Cloud Environments from the Whiteboard

We're continuing our series of iTKO Chalk Talks about moving Development and Testing environments to the Cloud. In our previous post, John discussed the Challenges of Dev & Test cloud environments. Since there are extremely significant cost savings -- on the order of 95%+ cheaper -- to be gained by provisioning this Pre-Production capacity in Public and Private Clouds (or, "Hybrid Cloud" Environments) it behooves any enterprise IT shop that uses and integrates software to pool resources and use Cloud Computing approaches in this way.

In this Dev & Test Cloud Chalk Talk installment, we'll talk about why and how companies are moving Pre-production aspects of the software lifecycle to cloud environments:

What about the hidden costs of Dev & Test Clouds? Cloud vendors and providers can point out the significant cost advantages of using Private and Public clouds for a given computing resource above, but they leave out continuing costs like MIPS charges, transaction fees, data maintenance, and many other cost aspects that cannot be reduced by moving Pre-production to Cloud environments. We will cover this aspect next.

Cloudy Chalk Talk 2: Dev & Test Clouds in Pre-Production

To continue our series on Cloud Application Chalk Talks, our "chief geek" John will cover Development and Test Clouds. After the move toward commoditizing some hardware and capacity in Public clouds, we find that the next logical step is using Clouds to level off Pre-Production costs throughout the software lifecycle.

Capacity in Production is fairly easy to predict, but it is hard to predict in Pre-production. You can plan to make capacity for spikes and volume and provision your infrastructure if you are an eCommerce vendor getting ready for the next Christmas rush. But what if you could eliminate 80% of the unpredictability of the Pre-Production environment that hundreds of skilled developers and testers use, and therefore not need to buy all that capacity up front? Private/Public Clouds are a great way for our partners to pool together computing resources into Private Clouds, use Public Clouds for overages, and try to regulate their infrastructure costs (compare oh, $.06-.12 a CPU hour of private/public capacity vs. $2.00 for each team using dedicated systems - and you see the economics).

So what happens next? We'll cover how companies are dealing with those "spikes" in capacity and cost, as well as the hidden costs that you don't usually hear about in the standard arguments for employing Cloud Computing and Virtualization in pre-production.

Chalk Talks on Cloud Applications - Part 1: What is a Cloud App?

Over the last 3 years, I have been asked quite frequently how our vision of service virtualization and validation applies to Cloud Computing. Indeed, we have waited a while to inject our own views in this arena (though we posted a solid whitepaper on Cloud and several recent Cloud commentaries on this blog). So far, we have often found that the Cloud discussion seems to be all about deployment, and not enough about the software lifecycle. Well, it is time to address that side of the equation.

So here's the first installment of a new Chalk Talk series I've recorded on Cloud Applications: "What is a Cloud App?"

Think about the difference between Cloud Applications - the software you run on a highly distributed, elastic architecture, versus the deployment model of Cloud Computing itself. They go hand-in-hand. Everything we've done in the software lifecycle up to this point - from legacy enablement and reuse, to service-orientation, to continuous integration, validation, and collaboration across multiple teams, has helped make Cloud Applications possible today.

We hope you find this series useful and invite your comments and suggestions for topics you would like to hear.

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.