IBM announced the public beta of Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud, also known as 'Developer Cloud.' The solution includes Software Delivery Services from Rational Software and is designed to accelerate organizations' development and test cycles.
Announced earlier in the year as a U.S.-only, invitation-based Technology Preview, IBM says the system has matured substantially since then. As a public beta, Developer Cloud is available on a first-come, first-served basis. It also runs the same code as the IBM Internal Cloud environment.
The Test component of Developer Cloud "represents an outstanding example of a workload that is custom-made for the cloud," observes Mike Hill, IBM vice president of Cloud Services. "Typically an organization has 50% to 75% of their infrastructure that is dedicated to test and, while the entire infrastructure is typically utilized at 15%, the least utilized infrastructure is the development and test infrastructure which has utilization down in the low single digits-so it is a perfect workload from a workload characteristic standpoint for the cloud."
The cloud approach to testing greatly accelerates application development and it also provides a significant increase in user satisfaction, Hill adds. Instead of the user putting in requirements and waiting for them to be physically set up, users can now can now go into a self-help portal, select the configuration they want, and get what they need within a few minutes. And, if they make a mistake, they can also go back and change the configuration in a matter of minutes, he notes.
"Plus, if you ask an organization to set up a test environment two times in a row, they won't get it the same both times," Hill continues. "In this environment, you can click to save your image and the next time you come back up, you restore that image and you have the same thing again so the reduction in errors is over 30%," he points out. "It is a tremendous use of the cloud in a low-risk environment."
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