On demand test and development environment on Cloud

Cloud computing holds a huge appeal for enterprise IT organizations in that it helps ramp up/down infrastructure resources in development and test environments based on demand. Test/development environment otherwise is a tricky area:

• In a typical IT environment, a considerable part of infrastructure is ear marked for development and testing environment, but they remain under utilized almost 90% of time.
• Discrepancies in test and production environments results in large number of problems faced by deployed product/project. However, creating a test environment which is an exact replica of production environment is not a practical option in most cases because of huge cost involved. Moreover testing has to be done for varied hardware/software platforms which the product has to support which is all the more expensive proposition.

Thus cloud based on-demand test/development platform will be of great value to IT managers:

• Substantial cost savings: no need of maintaining a dedicated testing/development environment which otherwise remains idle most of the time.
• Reduced time-to-market: development/testing will not have to wait for availability of a suitable environment and can be undertaken as planned.

A typical cloud based test/development platform should have provision for service request management, automated resource provisioning, resource management, configuration management, user self-service, charge back (metering and billing), SLA management.

What route should an enterprise take for realizing this platform – private, public or hybrid cloud?

• Enterprises that have already made considerable investment in internal test/development infrastructure should go for resource visualization and then transition to private cloud based test/development platform. The cloud can then be shared among business units or groups that don’t share resources today. Further usage of cloud resources can be tracked and charged back.
• At times private cloud will not be able to cater to all needs. Private cloud will be relatively smaller and can scale up to a certain limit. For example for very high end performance testing, once private cloud resources are exhausted, additional resource has to be provisioned from public cloud. Here we have hybrid cloud scenario.
• Small and medium enterprises that haven’t yet made substantial investment in internal test/development infrastructure can leverage public cloud for the same.