IBM Launches ‘Smart Cloud’ To Optimize Dev-and-Test Lifecycle 
IBM has released a cloud service for development and test, featuring provisioning, management, security, governance and billing services. IBM intends this integrated suite to deliver new levels of dev-and-test flexibility and speed from the cloud. IDN speaks with Fausto Bernardini, Director of Strategy and Architecture for IBM’s Cloud Portfolio for a preview.
IBM has rolled out its Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud. The offering will come complete with software to make provisioning, management, security, governance and billing more efficient.
The commercial launch of IBM’s cloud-based dev-and-test offering follows an extensive beta program with customers and partners, Fausto Bernardini, Director of Strategy and Architecture for IBM’s Cloud Portfolio told Integration Developer News. The aim of IBM’s revved up dev-and-test cloud offering is to dramatically reduce the time and labor it takes to set-up and conduct software tests – from days to as little as one hour, he said.
Big Blue’s latest cloud offering was in large part driven an IBM survey of CEOs, as well as IBM’s own experiences, Bernardini said. “IBM has significant internal operation for enterprise apps, a global developer support team, [many] massive data centers globally, and thousands of physical machines. And, frankly we saw tremendous benefits from making the whole [dev-and-test] process more efficient” Bernardini told IDN.
Even after virtualization, Bernardini said it could still take IBM up to five days to meet dev-and-test requests. “So, we found that we could really save a lot of labor costs with automation and a self-service approach,” he added. The approach IBM wanted was to allow dev teams to schedule and configure their own testing environments. This goal prompted Big Blue to explore how its existing portfolio of automation, management and governance solutions – from Rational, Tivoli and WebSphere – could optimize dev-and-test processes.
At a Glance
IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud
- Extensible process automation platform supports technology and business approvals of customized environments
- Private cloud—containing system, storage, network, images and image management
- Self-service portal for catalog-based requesting of test resources
- Integrated end-to-end process manages service requests, provisioning, and change and configuration management.
- Usage metering and accounting
IBM’s Strategy & Architecture
for Dev-and-Test Cloud
So, IBM undertook the task of designing and building a self-serve dev-and-test environment based on the cloud, which added automation, management and governance to Big Blue’s virtualized foundation. “As a result, we cut the [dev-and-test] set-up process to below 1 hour,” Bernardini added.
Inside IBM’s dev-and-test cloud environment, there is an ‘open’ foundation architecture which supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise, as well as Java. For extensibility, clients can work with their own images, as well as images from IBM Mashup Center, Lotus Forms Turbo, WebSphere Portal Server, Lotus Web Content Management, and IBM Information Management and all WebSphere-based offerings. [For more, See ‘At a Glance’ box].
The dev-and-test cloud also uses Tivoli Service Automation Manager and Tivoli Accounting Automation Manager to bring management and automation to many labor-intensive aspects of the dev-and-test process, from provisioning to billing.
“In architecting the [dev-and-test cloud] approach, we didn’t just look at core foundation resources, we looked at ways to optimize our processes,” Bernardini told IDN. “So, we removed manual approvals and put in more automated processes.” One example: Bernardini said IBM replaced manual spending approvals by putting in a monthly spending limit, which would allow project leads to more efficiently request and receive authorization for dev-and-test resources.
This example underscores what Bernardini called the “workload-specific approach” IBM is taking to its cloud offerings. “Our approach is not a generic, cloud-based raw infrastructure utility model. Instead, we’re driving for a scenario-driven approach,” that will optimize technology and process efficiencies for customers, he added.
How Automation, Governance
Can Multiply Cloud Benefits
In fact, Bernardini added automation and governance features are not simply a way to speed up cloud benefits. Done properly, these features can become valuable multipliers of benefits.
“If you don’t have automation of internal end-to-end processes, you may have labor expenses to create images for different requests, or unnecessary proliferation of images. But in addition to removing labor expenses, there are still pains unless you have automation to [apply] Best Practices when it comes to managing resources and processes throughout a project lifecycle. Customers are also feeling the pain there as well,” he said.
Another example where Bernardini said this approach to automation will be useful will be where clients have begun virtualization projects or are creating an image library. “They now feel they need something extra to automate provisioning and management of their resources,” he said.
“For example, developers can say, ‘I need these machines, running AIX or whatever,’ and in 20 minutes or so they will up and running. And, it’s not only the bare machines,” Bernardini explained. “We also define a governance process in which they constantly publish the [latest] golden sealed release and that is the image that gets provisioned.”
This dev-and-test lifecycle approach also brings other measureable benefits, including reduction of labor, easier and more accurate server provisioning and image setup; higher machine utilization; and automated usage metering and billing.
IBM Plans Other ‘Workload-Specific’ Clouds
IBM’s Smart Business Development & Test on the IBM Cloud will just be the first ‘flavor’ of cloud offering optimized for IT and business problem sets, according to Bernardini
Big Blue conducted a CEO survey, and said one of the findings was, “As companies go through the economic downturn, they are very sensitive to capital expense.” In dev-and-test, many executives indicated that their resources, both staff and hardware were really quite under-utilized
Other top requests include desktop virtualization and analytics. IBM intends to build out additional cloud use cases to meet these needs. “You will see a progression of announcements with more use cases,” Bernardini said.
