IBM is expected to launch its cloud-based test and development platform commercially in the year’s second quarter. Acknowledging that the cloud-based delivery model for IT services does not work for every type of application, the company says its experience has shown that test and development workloads not only work well in the cloud but also enable organizations to leverage benefits the model promises to a great extent.
Other companies that provide cloud computing services for test and development include
Amazon, with its Elastic Compute Cloud,
Google, with App Engine,
Rackspace, with Rackspace Cloud, and others. One of the ways IBM differs from many other providers is that in addition to public cloud services, it can provide physical infrastructure for customers to deploy private clouds in their own data centers, as well as manage it.
In the private-cloud space, IBM will compete directly with coalitions like the ones
Cisco recently made with
EMC,
NetApp and
VMware to deliver full-stack virtualized IT solutions. Another heavyweight in the space is the partnership between
Microsoft and
HP,
announced in January, also offering a full pre-integrated and virtualized solution. Microsoft also offers a public cloud service called
Windows Azure.
WHY START WITH TEST AND DEV?
Steve Abrams, chief architect for cloud computing at IBM Rational, says test and development is the “ideal first step” for companies that are shifting some of their workloads to the cloud. The main reason is the large amount of resources test and development processes require but underutilize to a great extent.
According to Abrams, 30 to 50 percent of an organization’s IT infrastructure is typically devoted to test and development, with many parts of it accessed only for short periods of time. A cloud-based model allows for a more elastic resource provisioning, only commissioning virtual instances when they are needed and decommissioning them when no longer used, Abrams said during a presentation at CloudSlam in March.
The cloud also allows developers to quickly provision a variety of standardized testing environments, consisting of various combinations of middleware types and operating systems. This eliminates the time highly paid developers spend on “un-boxing and installing software,” leaving them with more time to do actual development and test work.
The model can be applied in a situation when an application is tested on a series of differently configured virtual instances as well as to test how an application may work in an Internet-scale deployment, when the application sits outside of the cloud while accessed by a large amount of virtual instances deployed in the cloud.
It is hard to make a general statement about which types of applications are appropriate for the cloud and which are not, Abrams said. Every organization has different levels of priorities for factors like security, control and availability, making it hard to implement a set of standard practices for defining cloud-ready applications.
Web 2.0 and online collaboration applications, for example, can be prime candidates for the cloud since they are public-facing and do not require high degrees of security. High-performance computing can also be a good candidate in cases where security is not a high priority.
Applications that are not appropriate include traditional legacy applications or any workloads that have significant amounts of regulations applied to them.
IBM says using a cloud delivery model for test and development can cut IT labor costs in half, reduce “drastically” time-to-market and improve quality.
PICK YOUR CLOUD
Clients can choose from three versions of IBM’s new cloud services: a private-cloud infrastructure that sits behind the customer’s infrastructure built and managed by IBM; a test and development platform that runs on a public cloud; and a private cloud which includes the WebSphere CloudBurst appliance and which the customer manages themselves.
WebSphere CloudBurst dispenses and manages IBM middleware products delivered as virtual instances.
IBM chose Red Hat to provide the virtualization platform for the offering, giving the software company a boost in competition with the virtualization incumbents VMware, Microsoft and Citrix.
The company has offered a private beta version of the cloud service to select clients since June 2009 and made the beta version available to the public around October of that year. Users of the beta cloud include eBay-owned PayPal, the online payment processing service, and Spencer Trask Collaborative Innovations, a developer of an online collaboration platform for the US Department of Education.
IBM is not delivering the entire package of services on its own, having instead chosen to partner with a number of companies to create what it calls a “partner ecosystem.” The partners include RightScale and Kaavo, which provide solutions for application and workload deployment and resource provision and management in the cloud. Another two partners, Navajo Systems and Silanis, provide security services and Aviarc, Wavemaker and Corent enable application development.
IBM also provides services that help customer determine which of their workloads are appropriate for the cloud model.
The service will be available in the US and Canada in the second quarter of 2010 and will gradually be launched around the world throughout the year, according to an IBM news release.
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Keywords: IBM, test and development cloud, cloud computing |
Image of cloud at the top (modified) courtesy of Axel Rouvin via Wikimedia Commons 
