Testing against production clones made easier

To achieve successful agile development and test processes, enterprises are quickly adopting DevOps principles, and using Continuous Integration (CI) is a key practice.

The goal with CI is to get as reliable feedback as quickly as possible, resulting in higher quality software delivered faster.

However, most DevOps practitioners encounter constraints when implementing CI due to difficulties in automating the infrastructure, making it problematic to provision clones of multi-tier production applications, and capacity restraints in the datacentre, making it impossible to deploy these clones for every code commit. At present, automating CI processes can be very painful, time-consuming and fraught with configuration nightmares.

With an eye on easing this situation, Cloud Application Hypervisor provider, Ravello Systems, has announced it has added new plug-ins and RESTful APIs to provision entire multi-virtual machine environments, along with networking and storage, in the cloud.

Kit has also added a new Apache Maven plug-in, and programming language bindings for Ruby and Python, with support for CI systems including Jenkins, Bamboo, and Teamcity. With one API call, developers can instantly provision a complete clone of their existing on-premise production application and deploy it in the public cloud.

“The public cloud with its infinite capacity is very promising for continuous integration, but it’s an inherently different environment than what you have on premise”

With Apache Maven developers are able to manage a project’s build, deployment, testing, reporting and documentation from a central repository. The company says it has recognised the value of Maven as a build automation tool, so the plug-in is designed to help integrate Maven-based projects with Ravello Systems’ rich APIs. This integration makes it easier to automatically configure the build, testing and deployment processes, resulting in smoother operations.

Ravello’s SaaS offering allows enterprises to spin up clones of their existing multi-tier enterprise applications in the public cloud – without any changes to the virtual machines, networking or storage. With the addition of a new Maven plug-in and the availability of Ruby and Python bindings for integration with other build automation tools, Ravello now enables extreme CI on production clones in the cloud. Now developers and test engineers can use Ravello’s APIs to provision the entire environment, start and stop applications as needed, and automatically execute the tests and either shut down to release resources once the test has passed, or save the state if an issue needs to be debugged.

Now each code commit can be tested on a clone of production in the cloud for instant and accurate feedback.

“The public cloud with its infinite capacity is very promising for continuous integration, but it’s an inherently different environment than what you have on premise,” said Gil Hoffer, VP of R&D, Ravello Systems. “Your application might have multiple subnets, multiple network cards per server and specific storage requirements. With Ravello we abstract away the differences between the private and public clouds, and have built-in automation for provisioning and deploying those multi-tier applications in the cloud.”