Rav Ahuja, Cloud Computing, Emerging Technologies, and Growth Markets at IBM Information Management Software, led this session at the RightScale User Conference 2010 in Santa Clara.
Session Abstract: Development and testing is one of the leading use cases in cloud computing. Even large enterprises with stringent security requirements are using public clouds for developing and testing their applications. IBM and RightScale have partnered to make the process of developing and testing your database applications quick and efficient – and in this session, we'll demonstrate how. Examples will include spinning up Ruby on Rails and Java-based application stacks with DB2 and WebSphere. We'll also demonstrate scaling these systems on the fly, adding high availability and then cloning them.
11. Environment Test Development DB2 Data DB2 Config Amazon EC2 App Server DB2 server DB2 Data DB2 Config DB2 server App Server DB2 Config DB2 Data
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14. Retalon “ With RightScale and IBM’s middleware stack on the cloud, we have been able to easily develop and test our SaaS solution for IBM retail customers with few resources and little investment,” said Mark Krupnik, President of Retalon Inc. “Our development and test processes are predictable and repeatable, and with a single click of a button, our environments on the cloud can mirror a typical production environment .”
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Editor's Notes
Cloud is important to development and test and one of the reasons this was the first workload targeted by IBM In software delivery - - 30-50% of servers are dedicated to test- - yet these resources run at less that 10% utilization - - a large cost savings can be realized by offloading these resources and administrative activities to the cloud Leveraging a cloud delivery model for software develop and test can help customers in multiple ways Complex infrastructure - - causes lengthy on-boarding process for acquiring and installing technology – the cloud streamlines these processes and removes these costs High costs - - high costs of technology with low utilizations are expanded in large organizations – lob and IT management have limited oversight – the cloud helps increasing resource utilization and provides standardization and visibility into processes with a centralized, delivery model Chaos is rampant in software development and delivery – customers are challenged with weak project governance across extended global teams and inflexibility tooling integration - - the cloud provides a dynamic delivery platform to improve governance and increase the flexibility and collaboration of global development teams
The RightScale Development and Test Solution Pack includes the core RightScale Cloud Management Platform with two different user interfaces: a Self-Service Portal designed for developers and testers to launch servers in the cloud, and the full RightScale Management Dashboard designed for systems administrators to customize the pre-configured environments delivered with the solution pack. The solution pack comes with two types of pre-configured server environments for each supported development language, including PHP, Java, Rails and .NET. The All-in-One environment provides an easy way to do basic integration testing on a single machine in the cloud. The Multi-Server environment enables more complex testing and has separate load balancing, application and database servers. All components in the pre-configured environments can be unbundled, customized, and re-used to create the exact configuration required and to create environments that adhere to any corporate governance or security standards. Using the RightScale Development and Test Solution Pack is easy. Just follow these steps: STEP 1 : The systems administrator imports the desired configuration from the RightScale Library into his company’s account. STEP 2 : The systems administrator customizes the configurations for the application(s) and shares approved configurations with developers and testers. STEP 3 : The developer or tester logs into the Self-Service Portal and launches approved configurations. Developers and testers can also terminate any of these configurations at will. STEP 4 : The systems architect applies changes as necessary to the configurations once. Then, anytime a developer or tester’s server is restarted, the most recent changes can be applied.
Let’s look a little deeper into the specific RightScale Dev and Test Solution Pack. First, it delivers … available, easily provisioned resources. Developers can launch all-in-one environments where a single machine runs the entire stack (OS, App Server + Database) through an easy-to-use self-service portal. Testers can spin up simple 3-tier (4 server) environments where tier 1 is the load balancer, tier 2 is comprised of a couple of app servers and tier 3 is a single database server. This configuration is a base configuration with no high-availability or high-reliability. And then when they are no longer needed, they can shut them down. What is unique about RightScale’s solution is that as software moves into staging and production, the operations team can use the full power of RightScale to monitor, manage, and automate the production system. Because RightScale works with Infrastructure as a Service cloud providers, they have control over all levels of infrastructure. It’s not a black box like is the case in many PaaS offerings. They can completely control system behavior – how the infrastructure supporting applications or databases scales, how databases are backed up - as well has more easily troubleshoot problems.
Second, the solution pack helps organizations maintain consistent, reproducible configurations throughout the software lifecycle. The RightScale platform uses ServerTemplates to configure servers and then groups of ServerTemplates, or what we call Deployments, to launch multi-server, multi-tier environments. Because ServerTemplates are modular, consisting of a number of scripts that are executed, it is easy to repackage the same scripts and ServerTemplates into the configurations necessary for each stage. Any changes made to scripts or templates or deployments can be easily reflected across stages. And the components are version controlled or archived, so it’s easy to recreate past environments.
Many enterprise customers are looking to reap the benefits of the cloud computing but wish to build their own private cloud in their own data centers. IBM provides a number of solutions to help enterprise customers achieve this goal. IBM WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance (WCA) delivers automation of software provisioning for private clouds. Your enterprise creates a pool of resources that can include Linux, AIX and Linux for System z systems and WCA can be used to dispense IBM midleware, including DB2 on to this infrastructure.
Leon – after this slide please intro Kevin Schroder from Zend to talk about the Zend PHP stack ________________ Retalon is a provider of retail analytics solutions. Just like other ISVs, they find it difficult to expand their business by utilizing the traditional ISV business model. Long sales cycles, lack of funding to build a sales channel, limited geographic reach are all working against them. So, they are looking to SaaS model as a way to greatly expand their reach and to be able to reach markets that are not able to tap in to by simply selling software. By using RightScale, Retalon is able to entertain the idea of developing a SaaS offering. They are able to create development, test and alpha/beta environments without much resources and with very little investment. By utilizing the IBM middleware stack (DB2 + WebSphere) on RightScale, they can create development and test environments that mirror their typical production environments with a single click of a button. They can do it in a predictable and repeatable way and do not have to expend the effort to validate the environments they are building. By using RightScale with IBM’s DB2 database and WebSphere application server on the cloud, Retalon -- a provider of retail analytics solutions -- has been able to quickly develop a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering to expand its market reach. “ With RightScale and IBM’s middleware stack on the cloud, we have been able to easily develop and test our SaaS solution for IBM retail customers with few resources and little investment,” said Mark Krupnik, President of Retalon Inc. “Our development and test processes are predictable and repeatable, and with a single click of a button, our environments on the cloud can mirror a typical production environment.”