Sudhrity Mondal: Automating Dev/Test environments using Internal Clouds and Virtualization – a Case Study.

Cloud Computing Conference - Cloud Slam 2009.
Abstract. Mid to large scale enterprises require their development and test environments configured and re-configured quite often as new project gets underway or completes, project scope changes and/or project team size grows or shrinks. Setting up a development/test environment for a project can be costly, tedious and time consuming leaving aside the procedures that a large organization has to undergo. Organizations have dedicated teams to prepare such environments and use a wide variety of complex tools and procedures to provision and configure the hardware and software needed for the environments. Today it takes between 1 to 3 weeks to set up a new environment for a mid-sized project. Internal clouds usher a new era in data center automation. Coupled with virtualization, internal clouds can bring down the time it takes to setup such an environment to minutes and hours and reduce the overall capital and operational expenses for the data center.

This presentation discusses the implementation of a development and test environment automaton at a large financial services company built using an internal cloud solution from Cassatt and virtualization from VMware. It details the challenges encountered, the implemented solution, the gaps that still existed and custom development that had to be done for an end-to-end solution. It also explains how improved resource utilization and higher energy efficiency was achieved using Cassatt’s Active Image and Power management policies and resource re-purposing technologies while maintaining application SLAs. The presentation concludes by outlining how internal clouds can be used to automate production environments, implement business continuity solutions without the cost of expensive HA systems and enable operational agility for quick time to market.

The session will benefit data center architects and managers who are interested in learning about ways to automate data center operations, improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Video of the session: