Cloud Hosting Article

Ravello Systems, a provider of Cloud Application Hypervisor, announced it has been selected by Colabo, a provider of predictive analytics solutions, to enable agile application development and test infrastructure.

Under the partnership agreement Colabo will use Ravello Software-as-a-Service (SaaS (News - Alert)) to increase agility in its development and test environment.

The partnership benefits Colabo as it helps developers test continuously on replicas of production, significantly improving efficiency and quality, while lowering overall costs.

In the past developers used their own laptops to develop an application so they could run only a limited set of initial tests on a simulated environment. They also wrote code locally, ran initial unit tests on their laptops and checked in code.

For larger integration tests Quality Assurance (QA) teams periodically promoted code into a standard staging environment and orchestrated the process with the help of Jenkins.

As Colabo’s application became more complex, they started discovering many more issues and bugs only in the staging environment, which was very late in the development cycle. This led to high overhead, which slowed the pace of its application development and prevented the business from moving as fast as it could.

However, with the availability of the new cloud application hypervisor, developers can run a battery of automated tests on production replicas in the cloud with a click of a button.

Due to Ravello’s user friendly API and its integration with Colabo’s continuous integration system, code is always being tested on replicas of production, said Yoav Dembak, co-founder and CEO, Colabo.

With Ravello, Colabo has accelerated its development and test process while maintaining a high quality production infrastructure. This enables Colabo to support its growing business and better compete with companies small and large.

The cloud hypervisor has the ability to extend automation to the infrastructure level and created blueprints of their application. Each time a developer checks in code, Ravello automatically provisions the entire test environment in Amazon Web Services (News - Alert) (AWS), including virtual machines, networking and storage, and integrates with Jenkins to run tests.

Once these tests are completed, results are automatically sent to the developer and the environment is automatically shut down to reduce costs. This gives developers an idea how their code would perform in a production-like environment so they can find and fix issues easily.

In case a problem is discovered, Ravello also snapshots the entire application and its infrastructure, which makes it easier for developers and QA to recreate the scenario and fix the issue.

“Colabo has been using Ravello for over eight months now and has realized the benefits of working with a solution that accelerates development and test cycles and enhances collaboration,” said Rami Tamir, co-founder and CEO, Ravello Systems, in a statement.