The development and testing resource problem
Application development managers in enterprises face an acute problem day in and day out: they lack the resources for proper development and testing. This problem isn’t new. In fact, it’s been around for so long that most developers have learned to live with the pain. However, given increasing pressure from line of business owners to develop new applications and new features faster than ever, the problem is once again coming to the forefront in a big way.

Is the cloud a good solution?
Theoretically, from a 30,000-foot level, the public cloud — with its unlimited capacity — offers a good solution. However, using the cloud to develop and test an application that has to be deployed on-premise is near impossible, because the cloud is a completely different environment from the internal data center. In most cases, deploying an application on the cloud involves significant rewriting and re-coding. Just think about all the details: using the exact same hardened operating system with the same patch level and monitoring tools; identical physical specification (core count and memory size, network interface cards and disk controllers) and network and storage topology; controlling DNS names and DHCP address allocation; using virtual appliances (such as firewalls and load-balancers), and the list goes on and on. Let’s say you do all this and essentially rewrite your application to run in the cloud. Now what? Developing and testing that application is meaningless because it looks completely different from what the target production deployment on-premise will look like.

An ideal world
In an ideal world, developers would be able to replicate their application and its environment in the cloud, instantly, without making any changes whatsoever. They would be able to use the same VMs, the same networking and storage topology. Then, developers should be able to, instantly and on-demand, create as many copies of the application as they need for development and testing (integration testing, system testing, penetration testing, destructive testing, etc.). Such replicas of the application would be completely consistent with the on-premise production environment so issues are found early in the cycle, and not when the code hits staging or production.

Developers may want to take this concept further and implement Continuous Integration (CI). Doing so, every time a developer checks in code, their CI system fires up multiple copies of the production replica application in the cloud and runs tests in parallel. Developers will be able to collaborate on live application instances, make changes and save complete versions of the application including its infrastructure. For advanced users, the entire multi-VM application infrastructure stack (VMs, network config, storage config, etc.) should be programmable, managed with code and versioned along with the rest of the application.

At Ravello, we wanted to implement this vision of the ideal world, and quickly realized that doing so requires a fundamentally different approach. With that in mind, we developed what we call a Cloud Application Hypervisor.

Supercharge your application development with Ravello
The Cloud Application Hypervisor is a new technology that allows you to completely encapsulate your multi-VM application, along with its entire environment (networking and storage) and deploy it instantly on the Rackspace cloud (or any public cloud) – without making any changes to the VMs, OS or application.

Once you do that, you can create as many copies as you want for development and test with the click of a button or a simple API call. Advanced users can also integrate Ravello with their CI environments, work iteratively on live application instances and version the entire application and its infrastructure. (Click image to enlarge.)

Ravello is exposed as an easy to use SaaS offering. We have just opened up our beta to everyone, and you can try it out for free. We don’t require your credit card, or your cloud credentials. Check it out: www.ravellosystems.com.

There are a lot of tech companies out there developing some really cool apps, and most of those companies are uncertain about how to utilize three different, yet increasingly important, marketing mediums to help get their app/product out there: Facebook, mobile and landing pages.

Sure, a lot of them create a Facebook fan page, but aside from uploading a cover photo, they make no extra customizations. There are a number of ways to engage your user base through custom apps on Facebook: you can run contests, which can include gathering emails to send your latest product updates.

How about a mobile website, so your current and future customers can find more information about your app/product on the go? Something as simple as a mobile website is often overlooked.

Let’s say you advertised your app during a special event, like the Super Bowl. Where do you send the traffic? Some custom page you host? What happens if you get millions of visitors within a small period of time? What happens if those views spill over into your mobile website or Facebook fan page (assuming you’re hosting your own apps)? A lot of companies should focus on making their product as great as it can be. Taking focus off of the product to take on new projects, like worrying about marketing, can sometimes knock people off track. I’d personally be up for the challenge of trying to make all of that sustainable, but I am often too busy to tackle new projects and I don’t like taking away from our main mission: building the best product possible.

We utilize Rackspace Cloud Servers to help mitigate our customers’ risk of traffic overload. In fact, we ease the handling of the large influx of traffic with a web app accelerator called Varnish that sits behind the cloud load balancers and is set to cache the content for up to 10 seconds. After the 10 seconds, we serve the content from redis, unless any updates were made, whereas it is auto-generated and served.

Here’s a small server mockup to visualize how that would look – each level would scale horizontally. (Diagram by Gliffy)

Since we allow anyone to customize their social app/web page, every time someone uploads an image, we store it in the Cloud Files architecture and we set up sharding for the image paths/containers so any one path doesn’t store more than 100 images or so. Since our October 2012 launch, we’ve uploaded over 155,000 images.

Uptime is the most important thing for any business that has some sort of web presence and we trust Rackspace to help us keep our uptime as high as possible. We were known as Lujure prior to changing our name to Heyo, and we’ve literally gone through three server companies before finding one we really like.

We may be thought of as a DIY drag-and-drop builder, but what a lot of our customers don’t realize is that we are essentially a hosting company. We promise our customers high availability and fast response times and we can deliver on that promise through the relationship we’ve built with our Managed Cloud support team at Rackspace.

The global increase in the number of cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and *aaS) and a major uptick in cloud adoption has introduced a host of new challenges, especially in regards to cloud management and IT spending. There is a new need for deeper analytics of IT cost, usage and spend, and for optimization across business units to realize not only business objectives but IT strategy, as well.

The growing complexity of cloud services, coupled with customers’ demand to leverage the full potential of cloud architectures, makes it challenging to track cloud spending and managing cloud resources. Further complicating this is the variable nature of costs and usage metrics associated with cloud services: they can appear relatively small on their own, and can grow exponentially as different services are added. This can make for time-consuming (i.e. costly) accounting, budgeting and strategic planning processes. This problem only worsens once you add the logistics of factoring your physical, legacy IT infrastructure into the equation.

Oftentimes, customers new to the cloud face shockingly large bills or encounter a disconnect between their perceived and actual savings. Meanwhile, organizations are wasting time trying to manually – or sometimes in a semi-automated manner — keep tabs on cloud spend.

The pay-as-you-go characteristic of the cloud has been a major economic driver for cloud adoption. But the lack of a holistic view of past spending and future forecasts that is tied tightly into IT strategy and business objectives has left stakeholders and decision makers shooting in the dark or letting waste happen through trial-and-error.

Unlike traditional IT infrastructure, where many tools exist to analyze the performance metrics; cloud infrastructure lacks a simple yet powerful tool that bridges the gap. That’s where Xervmon comes in.

Rackspace hosts Xervmon’s  infrastructure from the ground up. We first integrated with the Rackspace Cloud to monitor our own spending and usage. The Rackspace Cloud has been a blessing for us. It helped us to first test and then slowly grow with our customers’ demands. We also recently enrolled into Rackspace Cloud Startup program. And our inclusion in the Rackspace Cloud Tools program enables Rackspace Cloud customers to use Xervmon to deliver analytics on usage and cloud spend.

Chris Thomas, IT Director from American MidStream, says “Xervmon has simplified the way we manage our spend and budget. Before Xervmon, I had to wait for accounting to provide me with reports and invoices that were sometimes inaccurate or the costs would overshoot my budget. Thankfully, Xervmon removes surprises from my IT spend. Everything is actual and in real time. Xervmon’s projections are within a 3 percent to 4 percent margin of error.”

The Rackspace Cloud User Voice portal has played an important role with several features Xervmon has incorporated into the tool. In next several weeks, there are more features planned to address the machine usage analytics and smart workload management between private and public clouds including OpenStack and the Rackspace open cloud.

If stopping the waste of IT resources and having strong control of your IT budget is your No. 1 priority, then check out the Xervmon tool for FREE. If you have any questions, reach out to support@xervmon.com.