App Testing Enabled Through Public Cloud by Ravello Systems
App Testing Enabled Through Public Cloud by Ravello Systems by UCStrategies Staff
The creators of the KVM open source hypervisor, Ravello Systems, have unveiled a SaaS offering which will allow enterprises to benefit from the virtually unlimited capacity of the public cloud to test their on-premise apps.
This move is significant, particularly as enterprises are being asked to develop apps which are faster and can keep up-to-speed with business requirements. Agile development methods are utilized by many, and their apps are tested to ensure problems are not transmitted to the final product.
Testing apps requires a lot of free capacity, which is something that most enterprises do not have a lot of in their data centers.
Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, HP and others provide public clouds which have a lot of capacity, but this is very different from the enterprise data center, which means that apps need to go through big alterations in order to operate on it.
The new service from Palo Alto, California-based Ravello Systems means that the public cloud will act as an enterprise data center from a testing standpoint, according to the senior vice president of products at Ravello Systems, Navin Thadani.
Thadani commented that with the Ravello service, “You can take your virtual machine apps, exactly as they're running in your data center, and put them in the public cloud to test them.” A beta of the service was launched in February of this year, which has been fine-tuned continuously since.
Ravello uses a proprietary cloud application hypervisor to address infrastructure automation, and this also lets customers take virtual machines from VMware or Red Hat (KVM) and operate these on a public cloud, without adding charges.
Where a number of virtual machines are used, a proprietary technology called an I/O Overlay is used by Ravello, and this uses software-defined networking to ensure storage and networking resources remain linked when the app is being tested in the public cloud.
The app-testing issue is being confronted by a number of enterprises at present, and most address this task by statically provisioning their environments, which is inefficient, according to Thadani.
Thadani added that others utilize a level of app automation and configuration management, but these also do not address the full issue. He said: “It's really hard to automate the whole infrastructure.”
The company’s service is priced on a per-user basis, and costs vary depending on the size and complexity of the app, and whether it's optimized for speed or for performance. Ravello Systems landed $26 million in funding in February of this year. (CY) Link