Test and Development environments on private Cloud have gone beyond capex optimization to acting as disaster recovery support systems. By Heena Jhingan
India is at the cusp of a Cloud revolution, and adoption of this technology is massively driven by the IT/ ITeS vertical. The IT/ITeS is a key vertical consuming the Cloud technology as most of the players under this segment offer services to global customers and they need to invest in the technology to serve their clients.
Most of the large Indian IT vendors have built private Cloud environments for their internal development and test provisioning, and some have built public Cloud services platforms to deliver mainly Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.
The overall Cloud market in India is rapidly growing and average growth rate has been in the order of 65% over the last three years. At this point in time, private Cloud market is about $ 750 mn, including both the hardware and the software components.
According to Praveen Bhadada, Director – Market Expansion, Zinnov Management Consulting, traditionally, the growth of IT/ITeS companies had been around head count, however as they grew further, they could not have relied solely on adding resources. This is where the Cloud computing concept came handy, without having to invest in resources directly; these IT firms could invest in platforms for service delivery and develop several test cases on the Cloud that could be used by the developers from anywhere.
“This way the companies can drive non linear growth and secondly, Cloud provides the capability, enabling any resource to get access to any resource. A majority of the IT/ITeS organisations are now putting their money in building Cloud-based infrastructure. They are focused at integration of IT for deliverance of service on top of it, either by adopting Cloud or through a hosted model,” Bhadada noted.
Development and testing are crucial components in the IT/ITeS space. Nearly 25% of the revenues for these companies are driven by software testing. The market watchers view the addressable market for Software testing as a Service to be as big as the entire software market, as they believe that all of the testing could potentially reside on the Cloud in future.
From the revenues perspective, Daisy Chittilapilly, VP- ITS Sales, Cisco-India Saarc, observed that since IT/ITeS companies in India earned 70-80% of the revenues from application development and testing, it was critical for them to optimize cost and processes on these fronts.
“All the top five Indian IT companies in India, including the likes of Wipro and HCL are in the process of moving critical workloads to Cloud. EMC is known to be using private Cloud extensively for test and development” she said.
A key factor responsible for making Test and Development (T&D), a low hanging fruit for the enterprises to be migrated to the Cloud is the fact that at these stages there is no actual production happening, and thus the SLA requirements may not be very high.
Moreover, with the overall span of project and time to market shrinking, CIOs are compelled to adopt the necessary evil called Virtualization targeting the private Cloud in general.
N Nataraj, CIO, Hexaware Technologies elaborated that in most instances, the IT heads create a blue print for the servers. For example, if one has an environment of using 100 servers a year, a standard server template can be created, which is typically run from the private Cloud. The template can be accessed by the users, and the business units. The end user business units log on to the server dashboard and select server template to execute the test or development cycle, and because each of the server instances is independent so end user could perform whatever the action without being concerned about modifying the environment of the other end user. Once they are done with the project they release back the instances to the pool.
“Such a practice of virtualization has brought server provisioning time down from 40 days to one hour and resulted in nearly 40% reduction in hardware cost. Utilization of the hardware has jumped from 10% to 50%. When our revenues grew about 30% last year, the amount of servers that we added was the least on year on year basis. When one server can scale up to 28 virtual servers, the physical server addition is no more a requirement,” he corroborated.
Saji Thopill, General Manager- Enterprise Cloud Computing and Data Center, Wipro, observed that there definitely is a trend that that is putting the Indian IT industry into the path of using private Cloud.
However, he pointed that was it was important to know the difference between a virtualized environment and a full-fledged private Cloud. “In the industry you will see virtualization, virtualization++ and the private Cloud. These are various stages in an enterprise’s journey to Cloud, virtualization being the first step. In fact, these environments are technology islands in themselves, and cannot be called a private Cloud set up. Sometimes, the enterprises could be to doing basic levels of test and development in that kind of an environment. There are verticals, where you could do 100% of the test and development processes in the virtualized environment,” Thopill explained, adding that today every customer of theirs had a virtualized environment, if not a Cloud.
There are fundamentally three drivers for a growing trend of using Cloud environments for Test and Development. From pure technology view, it is about providing greater value on the business and aligning between IT and business. A big wave within the enterprises today is the BYOD phenomenon and an enterprise’s IT budgeting model.
Dhiraj Sinha, Head-Testing Practice, Dell Services that does testing and development for its own consumption and at the same time also provides it as a service, said, “Unlike in the past when the mobile applications were focused on consumer consumption, today it is important that critical pieces of enterprise apps are available on the mobile devices, there are a number of platforms that the developers need to deal with.”
Agility, flexibility and standardisation
IT and budgeting aligned to an organisation’s strategy is a winning combination. A smart IT house organises its investments in “Run-Grow-Transform” method. “Run” mainly is for the “Lights-on” operations while “Grow-Transform” is strategic and innovation driving. Test and Development allocation is majorly from the “grow-transform” bucket.
“Typical IT/ITes is heavy on “Run” part with investments many a times exceeding 75% of the over all spend. A healthy, early technology adopter and leading IT house should surely have its ‘grow-transform’ budget exceeding 25 to 30%, saving a good pie for T & D, and work towards increasing this further. To avoid heavy capex due to software, tools and its support involved in T&D, the next generation IT houses are leveraging OS contracts with stringent SLA’s and slowly looking out for Cloud leverage,” said Sumanth Tarigopula, Director, Global Delivery-India, HP Enterprise Services
An efficient T & D is very critical and it shifts an IT/ITeS from being a ‘commodity like service provider’ to ‘an innovative partner’ for business groups, Tarigopula added, saying that the current snapshot of IT/ITes landscape worldwide is dominated by more of Testing Clouds for enterprises while development is catching up at a very fast pace. Definitely an integrated Cloud story for entire enterprise is a long way to go. A mix of business process into IT T & D is yet to be seen due to many complex dimensions including security, data segregation and also organisation structure and KPI’s.
Why private Cloud?
The large IT firms have already made a significant investment in their infrastructure – servers, storage, data centres, their first priority is to maximize the usage of the existing infrastructure, rather than make new investments; in that case the enterprises adopt a model where by virtualizing their server infrastructure they can increase the existing efficiency or utilisation of the existing boxes in place.
T&D leveraging Cloud reduces the infra procurement cycle, build, support and maintenance overhead. Cloud also reduces the cost of infra planning and involved Capex. The reduced cycle for provisioning and fulfillment at resource/platform layers is a big boon to T&D from Cloud build and manage technology.
The industry watchers are of the opinion that the IT ecosystem mostly is heterogeneous with multiple vendors and subsystems. This makes integration across infra (In-premises/off-premises) a challenge. Though a much talked about ‘true hybrid’ environment is yet to be seen. Besides, security adds the additional complexity. Hence private Cloud fits the bill much closer in immediate term compared to Public Clouds. Contrary to IT/ITes T&D, some of the generic T&D in an open developer forum is supported very well on the public Cloud.
Fit for Cloud
Cloud is firming its position in the market as a mature technology. The enterprises are at various levels of this maturity curve, virtualization being the basic step. Most of the enterprise have virtualized their servers, and are now looking at virtualizing their orchestration layer. Today the licensing models are complicated, so there the industry is witnessing consolidation.
“There are conversations happening in the test and development space around not just the infrastructure virtualization, but virtualizing the software layer as well,” Chittilapilly of Cisco said.
According to Thopill of Wipro, most of the next generation applications are cutting edge and by default are a candidate for using a private Cloud. At the development stage, there could be different developers using different workstations, all the applications can be delivered using virtual desktop irrespective of what back-end platform they are working on. At the back-end we are forced to a have dedicated environment for a customer just because of compliance, or graphics processes. Also at times some big data applications are not made for Cloud.
Bhadada explained that there are hundreds of applications that are not on Cloud, but those applications still could be tested using Software testing as a Service. The enterprises essentially pick software testing use cases in the Cloud and run those cases on the application, so irrespective of the fact that the application is on Cloud or off it, the Software testing on Cloud could enable all of this.
Mandar Kulkarni, VP Solutions Engineering and Private Cloud practice, Netmagic, informed that all the new test and development environments were now coming on Cloud, in fact the environments that were build earlier, about 2-3 years back, were now being converted into Cloud.
“Now a very small amount of test and development is happening on physical environment, except for the cases where the applications, like the system application that need to talk to hardware directly, they have to be deployed on physical infrastructure, in that case there is little choice,” he said.
Integrating test and production
Typically when enterprises would want to provide development and test environment, they would have two paths— PaaS and IaaS. PaaS would be the way forward for web, JAVA and other next generation of the applications that are developed on the platforms and run on the internet. For this category, there is a particular kind of investment going into providing a complete private Cloud solution in terms of app server, web server, the databases and the tools around it.
The enterprise class solutions like SAP and Oracle ERP applications, have a particular kind of architecture in terms of database server, an app server, and a particular way of managing the overall Cloud capability, so under Infrastructure as a Service comes a separate kind of a solution. Under IaaS, they could have a Developers landscape, a QA landscape, a testing and a staging one which culminates into production. Most of the service providers prefer to keep these as separate pieces so that they can avail outsourcing services and focus on the core services.
“Commoditization of the hardware has led to a horizontal approach for IaaS solutions. However, PaaS is more verticalised as business level testing requires vertical-focused solutions, depending on the size of the enterprise. A lot more optimisation needs to come interlaced with subject expertise for development capabilities,” reasoned, Suresh Samuel Jayaseelan, Director Testing Services, CSC India.
He explained that development and testing is a complete life cycle. At the initial stages, an enterprise could be dealing with hundreds (100-150) configurations. When the processes are promoted to QA environment the number of configurations could be reduced to about 20 to 25 of them and at the staging level these could further be reduced to 3-4, while at production there will be on final image.
“Since multiple activities are being tracked in the development and test cycle, making sure that all the changes that are introduced into the system are converged and the impact of one does not affect the other, is a challenging task in the physical environment. It becomes difficult as configuration changes are happening rapidly as workload comes at a much faster pace, you need to develop tools that can match the pace at which the workload is moving. Cloud is equipped to manage that kind of agility,” he elaborated.
Traditionally, the test environment could support only one tool, be it functional, performance, application security, governance- compliance tool. But in a Cloud, the infrastructure remains in utility mode, and so are the tools as enterprises use SaaS. In that case, the enterprises pay for whatever they use. Besides they could use more than one tool. They could do triangulation on the code and overall domain gets reduced, and for a lower cost, the enterprises get more tools and greater productivity.
“In a test lifecycle, you develop a golden image that is ready to deployed in the production, If the production site faces a disaster or business discontinuity situation, the enterprises can pick the golden image from the test environment and use it as DR support. If a disaster strikes it normally takes a week or about 10 days to get it back on the track, however, with Cloud support this time has been dramatically shrunk to 4-5 hours. This is emerging as a very unique thing in the testing and development space,” Jayaseelan elaborated.
Another, big draw for enterprises to depend on Cloud for T&D is the ease of managing the virtual users or plastic traffic. For the next generation users like Amazon or Hallmark, there could be a spike in the business on certain days, if the infrastructure is not prepared to manage that, the site might come down. While testing in the Cloud environment it is possible to generate as many virtual users as desired. Conventionally, all the virtual users could be created from the one given site, in Cloud you can engineer the traffic data volume, stimulate virtual traffic data from various sites.
The biggest trend that Srikanth Karnakota, Director Server and Cloud Business, Microsoft, saw for T&D in cloud was the emergence of a common development platform for the multiple devices.
“We see a shift in the developer perception, and see them breaking free from the traditional conservativeness,and accepting software convergence. Private Cloud adoption in general may be dominant at the moment, however, the Public Cloud is growing faster. Industry has been making efforts to mitigate concerns around security in the Cloud, which has led to more faith in public Cloud, even for T&D activities,” Karnakota said.
Testing times
Though Cloud environment makes testing and development process more cost effective, agile and standardised, there are a plethora of challenges that it hurls at the enterprises. Experts believe that managing workload and infrastructure interaction is a tough task for the enterprises, while working in cloud. Many new technologies are driving test on Cloud, so enterprises need to keep pace with the new technological trends and more importantly, a factor that demands great care is latency planning.
Stressing that most of the enterprises that have already deployed Cloud, Santanu Ghose, Director, Business Critical Systems, HP India said those enterprises were now looking at functionalities offered by a hybrid cloud environment. This becomes all the more challenging when they demand interoperability between hybrid, private, managed and public cloud environments.
Going forward, business dynamics driving organisations to have effective shared KPIs between IT and business domains supported by technology will lead to genesis of integrated ecosystem where we will witness more and more organisations hosting its IT and business on an integrated Cloud environment comfortably and with full compliance.
