VM Depot helps businesses reduce the cost of enterprise testing

Wu Kai, senior vice president of Evonik, said: "On the Microsoft Azure platform, using the VM Depot dramatically improves our hardware (CPU) usage efficiency to 60% and at the same time reduces the test preparation cycle time To the original 1 / 3. Microsoft Azure and VM Depot this program portfolio has helped Sivacees quickly keep up with the pace of cloud computing, to customers and business partners from all over the world to provide services.

Pactera Technology International Ltd is a provider of consulting and technology services with global operational capabilities and strict quality standards and efficient delivery processes. Since its founding in 1995, Evonik has been providing world-class business / IT consulting, solutions and outsourcing services to clients all over the world and has extensive experience in financial services, telecommunications, manufacturing, high technology, life sciences, energy, tourism and transportation, Retail and distribution and other fields has accumulated a wealth of industry experience, major clients, including many Fortune 500 companies with large and medium-sized Chinese enterprises .

VanceInfo Technologies Ltd. and HiSoft Technologies (International) are two predecessors of VanceInfo , both of which are prominent software outsourcing service providers in China. On August 11, 2012, VanceInfo and HiSoft announced that the two companies merged into Wisconsin HiVision Technology Co., Ltd. and the merged Vince SiuHui of the two companies has become the largest player in China's software outsourcing industry , Through the resources, business complement each other, to provide a more excellent customer service.

Through its strategic headquarters in China, and its regional headquarters in North America, Asia Pacific and Europe, Synopsys provides customers with the perfect combination of personalized customization and best-in-class economic benefits. Delivers Enterprise Applications, Business Intelligence, Application Development and Maintenance, Mobile Solutions, Cloud Computing, Infrastructure Management, Software Development and Globalization to Customers through Delivery Centers in the United States, Europe, Australia, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia and China , A one-stop shop for business process outsourcing that meets our customers 'needs for seamless delivery and technical support worldwide while supporting our customers' business growth strategies to help them succeed.

Hardware costs and open source opportunities and challenges

With the continuous expansion of the company's business, more and more projects need to be developed and delivered in a timely manner, meanwhile we have to face higher and higher hardware costs and maintenance costs. Taking a medium-sized development and testing team as an example, the entire team needs at least development, testing, data servers, version control cabinet servers, and automated build servers throughout the software development and testing cycle.

As these machines are dedicated to a development and testing team throughout the development and testing process, the resources on these hardwares are inevitably unused. Take CPU as an example, the utilization rate of CPU resources on most servers used by the development test team is only about 30%. Coupled with the different teams located in different locations, but also for the unified management of these hardware has brought great difficulties.

At the same time, with the development of the Internet, more and more projects have begun to come into contact with and use various open source softwares. Among them, not only are the tools used in developing and testing the whole project, but also the entire project is built on open source software On the program. The flexibility of open source software gives customers more choice and, in some cases, more economical and convenient, but at the same time there are some problems As we all know, open source software is far less than the documentation and technical support of commercial software, which The entire software development and testing process of preparation and configuration of the environment posed a challenge. Maybe in the process of preparing the environment, we encountered unexpected difficulties, but in a short time we can not find a perfect solution. To solve this problem, we may devote a lot of energy and time.

The theory of agile software development is understood and adopted by more and more people. Most teams adopt more or less agile methods when developing test projects. At the heart of agile development is continuous integration and continuous delivery, which requires us to be responsive to changes in customer requirements and deliver on-going software of real value to our customers. This poses new needs for the overall test environment. Take the test environment as an example. Suppose we publish once a week. Each time we use to prepare a test environment is 3 hours. There are at least 3 test environments in a team. Then at least 9 hours a week will be used by us to prepare the test environment, if the entire development cycle is eight months, according to four weeks a month to calculate, then there will be 288 hours were wasted in the repeated preparation test environment this Work on the item.

Solutions and solutions

Whether it's the hardware costs and maintenance costs mentioned above, or the need for a test environment for open source software and agile development, we need to find a workable solution for cost reduction, continuous integration and continuity deliver. With Microsoft Azure entering the Chinese market, the enthusiasm of the domestic IT industry for cloud computing applications is on the rise. As a leading technology service provider in the industry, we decided to build a hybrid cloud platform based on Microsoft Azure and System Center platforms and migrate part of the development test environment. Microsoft Azure is an open cloud computing platform that is not exclusive to Microsoft technology developers. Microsoft Azure provides perfect support for open source technologies. The migration of native development testing environments based on open source technology to the Microsoft Azure platform does not necessarily mean moving to Microsoft technologies in an attempt to relinquish or replace existing development technologies.

With Microsoft Azure and System Center to build a hybrid cloud development and testing environment, the hardware costs have been significantly reduced, while the hardware resources, idle rate and unified management of hardware resources have also been a certain degree of resolution.

Thanks to Microsoft Azure's strong support for open source software, we can quickly and easily search the required Linux VM images on the Azure platform using the VM Depot service from Microsoft Open Tech. Linux virtual machine images on VM Depot were created and prepared for quick launching of Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and other distributions, many of which have already included server platforms for many platforms such as Ruby on Rails, Django, PHP, Drupal, Word Press, Wiki and Apache Solr platforms. All of these images can be deployed through Microsoft-provided Windows, Linux, or Mac OS command-line tools. A simple command script generated automatically by the VM Depot service creates and starts a fully configured Linux virtual machine in a very short period of time. This brings great convenience to the test environment and the deployment of software throughout the development and testing process.

Income and experience

After testing some of the development of cloud migration test:

1. Significantly reduce hardware procurement and maintenance costs

Prior to using the virtualization technology cloud platform, a medium-sized development and testing team need to develop a total of 6 test machines, a variety of servers 5. After migrating to the cloud platform, 5 servers adopt the virtualization technology, and 3 test machines can also reduce the configuration appropriately. The use of virtualization technology, the overall utilization of the hardware has also been greatly improved, such as CPU utilization can be about 60%.

2. product testing cycle significantly shortened

In the development and testing environment based on open source software, the construction of testing environment has always been a waste of time. Now with Microsoft Azure and VM Depot services combined, a Linux environment configuration time reduced to less than 1 hour. Compared to the original 3 hours of environmental preparation, the time cost is reduced a lot. Taking the above example for a period of 8 months of development and testing activities, environment preparation time takes a total of 288 hours, now with the help of Azure and VM Depot can be compressed to 96 hours, and can also be automated through the script Way to further reduce the deployment time of the entire environment. By testing the deployment of environmental compression time, you can significantly shorten the test cycle.

3. The delivery time for delivery to users has been significantly reduced

If you also use the Azure cloud platform, using the VM Depot service can save you a lot of time in deploying the deployment environment. And through scripted deployment of real-time changes can be synchronized into the production environment, truly in the shortest possible time to deliver the most useful software to customers.

4. Image reuse rate increase

Due to the large number of development teams, many different types of servers are used among development teams. You can upload common mirror files to VM Depot according to the nature of team work. Each build environment can be reused to avoid duplication of work every time a mirror is re-created.

5. Using VM Depot saves storage space for mirroring

You can create your own images on Microsoft Azure for future environment building, but saving images on Microsoft Azure consumes storage and costs. With the VM Depot service, the mirroring is moved to the service provider and our Azure account eliminates the cost of storage and does not impact the environment's build needs

By migrating part of the development test environment to the cloud, we think it is a good idea to build a development test environment based on Microsoft Azure or hybrid cloud. Microsoft Azure's IaaS service provides great scalability for building a development test environment, and Microsoft Azure is not a Windows developer-only service. Open source technologies such as VM Depot can also make a difference on the Microsoft Azure platform.