IBM has announced the beta release of two products that help bring SOA test and development to both private and public cloud computing environments. The new offerings provide test and development tools and infrastructure.
This move also signifies IBM's acknowledgement that development and test are two of the first viable uses for cloud computing.
IBM Smart Business Development and Test on IBM Cloud provides storage and compute resources to let developers move test and development workloads to the cloud. The IBM Rational Software Delivery Services for Cloud Computing provides complementary lifecycle and infrastructural management tools.
All of the services related to this new test and development platform are available as REST interfaces and can be tooled for public, private or hybrid clouds. Though optimized for IBM's own middleware products, the company claims it is willing to help customers integrate its development and test platform with best-of-breed stacks as well.
"Development teams are generally what we find to be the first users," said Ashok Reddy, director of software delivery & security initiatives for IBM Rational. "Long running business apps on the cloud don't get as much of a value as test and dev."
Reddy said testing is popular on the public cloud because it can be challenging for developers to find enough machines inside their enterprise to test on, especially when test is a singular phase of the development cycle. The
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ability to handle the spikes in workload that testing creates is a common value proposition for on-demand compute resources. The public cloud is also popular for testing because testing does not expose source code like development itself.
Cloud computing may also be attractive to developers taking an agile approach, where test and integration occur on an ongoing basis. When the resources needed are constantly in flux, it can be more cost effective to be able to scale up and down on the fly.