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CONSIDER APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

AND TEST FOR YOUR FIRST CLOUD
PROJECT
Gordon Haff

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With rare exceptions, theres little question about whether you will adopt cloud computing in
some form. You will. Rather, the questions you are probably asking revolve around how best to
get started or, perhaps, how to start managing the cloud use that is already happening within
your organization.

The overwhelming
majority of successful
cloud projects focus
on custom application
development and
testing.
GARTNER,
CLIMBING THE CLOUD
ORCHESTRATION CURVE,
JANUARY 2014
G00255434

For many, one good answer will be to start with a cloud for application development and test
(dev/test) because it:
Can deliver benefits even at relatively modest scale points, offering the opportunity to start small.
Provides an internal alternative to current public cloud use and thus can streamline and
standardize development workflows.
Can be independent of production systems and processesalthough they can be integrated
over time whether through adopting DevOps methodologies or other approaches.
Perhaps most importantly though, a dev/test cloud directly addresses one of the most pressing needs at many organizations: Improving developer productivity and accelerating application
development. In a rapidly digitizing world, delivering new applications faster and more efficiently
isnt just a nice-to-have; its a key component of your business agility and, ultimately, your
ability to win against the competition.
Red Hat can help you get started with a dev/test cloud whether you want to build and operate
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, give
your developers a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with OpenShift by Red Hat, or use certified
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss Middleware products in a public cloud through the
Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program.

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 Successful businesses

perpetually seek a
competitive advantage,
an edge over their
would-be market rivals.
For many businesses,
developers will be that
edge. Businesses that
will be successful over
the next decade will be
those that understand
and appreciate
the importance of
developers. Whether
theyre lowering costs
and accelerating
infrastructure, building
the applications that
make a platform
more compelling, or
leveraging the APIs
that drive revenues,
developers will be the
determining factor
between success
and failure.
STEPHEN OGRADY
REDMONK, THE NEW KINGMAKERS

INTRODUCTION
When an organization decides to implement a cloud, its ultimate ambitions probably go beyond
application dev/test. But dev/test is often the starting point. And for good reason.
Dev/test tends to be a dynamic activity within an organization; new environments are stood up and
torn down all the timecertainly much more frequently than is normally the case with production
applications. Therefore, the agility and flexibility that a cloud can provide is especially valuable here.
At the same time, dev/test also tends to be, within some constraints, something of a sandbox with
new technologies and approachesthe subject of ongoing experimentation. What better place to try
out new infrastructure approaches before putting them into production?
Of course, weve seen this story play out before. When virtualization went mainstream in the late
1990s, it was pitched as a tool to let you develop and test on a variety of operating system versions
and types without needing a physical system under your desk for each unique instance. Furthermore,
if your buggy code corrupted an environment, you could just wipe the slate clean by firing up a new
image rather than rebuilding an entire system.
Over time, virtualization has gone on to be widely used in production. Cloud environments go
beyond virtualization by being more dynamic. By being more scaleable. By being hybrid. Most fundamentally, clouds introduce concepts such as catalogs of standardized servicesdefined as part of a
software-defined infrastructureand offers them to consumers, such as developers, through a lowtouch, self-service interface.
Cloud adoption has parallels to the introduction of virtualization. Frequently, it first takes place
within organizations where delivering new IT services rapidly is both a strategic concern and directly
connected to revenue. And it will first be adopted within those organizations at the point where
those new IT services are createdin the application development groups.

WHY DEV/TEST MATTERS TODAY

There have long been companies whose businesses depended on custom software. That being the
case, their software development processes were hopefully something of a core competency. Whats
different today is that differentiating based on applications and other aspects of IT isnt an outlier;
its increasingly the norm. The fact that routine functionsthink customer relationship management,
for exampleare now often outsourced in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has only intensified the trend. Companies can now focus their resources on delivering services that can make a difference rather than on the mundane tasks that nonetheless somehow have to get done.
This reflects how we are seeing a great reimagining of business processes,manufacturing, using
data, and the connections between businesses and consumers, consumers and businesses, and
among consumers themselves.
Whether widespread automation of factories, 3D printing, mobile applications, predictive analytics,
or even the latest Internet-of-Things, the most successful businesses are doing innovative things with
IT. This means the application is ever more central to the business. And in a world where the pace of
change is seemingly on an ever upward trajectory, the difference between success and failure may
result from how many applications can be put into service and how quickly they can be put in service.

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 In the best-case

scenarios, developers
now can be productive
in fewer than 15 minutes.
In these scenarios,
I&O [Infrastructure
& Operations]
professionals
are successful at
transitioning public
cloud usage to its
internal alternative.
FORRESTER
FOUR COMMON PRIVATE CLOUD
STRATEGIES BY LAUREN E. NELSON
OCTOBER 2013

TODAYS IT CHALLENGE

Tremendous
pressure from
the business to
enable growth

Constant
demand for
new services
(new apps)

Need to
accelerate
time-to-market
for applications

CL0060

Yet, this sort of agility is not the norm. While virtualization alone has generally improved server
utilization, it often does relatively little to improve developer productivity or to accelerate
application delivery.

APPROACHES FOR DEV/TEST

We chose
OpenShift as the PaaS
foundation for cloud
offerings thanks to
its flexible, open source
architecture, its minimaloverhead application
programming model,
and its excellent support
for DevOps. Our teams
are finding OpenShift
to be enterprise-grade,
scalable, stable,
and productive.

Perhaps the most common reaction weve seen to this mismatch between what developers are
asking IT organizations to deliver and what those organizations are actually delivering is whats
called shadow IT. Users are going straight to public cloudsbypassing IT organizationsand spinning up needed compute resources, paying for it with a credit card. This may provide developers
with some temporary relief, but it can introduce security and compliance risks. It can also result in
applications that dont interoperate or that cant be easily transitioned to a production environment.
However, as Forrester notes, Banning the use of unauthorized services will just lead to resentment
and more stealthy circumvention. 1 Rather, they counsel that The most favored approach, according to Forrester inquiries, is to provide an alternative environment to the public cloud, delivering
this agility in-house. But to successfully incent voluntary change, organizations must approach this
service as a cloud and not as an enhancement of the enterprises existing services.
Organizations can deliver this agility in two complementary ways: By building cloud-style
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), such as that provided by OpenStack, and by delivering complete
development environments as a Platform-as-a-Service. Public clouds can also be added as part of a
managed, hybrid environment.

BRETT ADAM
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,
PLATFORM, CA TECHNOLOGIES

1 Forrester, Four Common Private Cloud Strategies by Lauren E. Nelson October 2013

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HOW RED HAT CAN HELP

Red Hat

Enterprise Linux
OpenStack Platform
enables us to react
faster to customer
demands, and is
instrumental for our
own internal cloud
development needs.
The solution enabled
us to build out our
own private cloud on
a secure and scalable
foundation.
YOSHI TAMURA,
PRODUCT MANAGER,
MIDOKURA
http://red.ht/1v484PF

Red Hats open hybrid cloud portfolio includes a variety of offerings to get you started building
a cloud for dev/test.

IaaS
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform builds on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide
an application platform for cloud workloads with a large ecosystem and advanced features for
writing new applications. OpenStack allows organizations to build a private cloud that has characteristics of a public cloud, including self-service, on-demand access to computing resources. Using
OpenStack, an IT organization can, in effect, become a cloud provider to their internal users. At the
same time, IT maintains direct control over the infrastructure and can augment OpenStack capabilities through a cloud management platform (CMP) such as Red Hat CloudForms to establish, monitor,
and manage policies, plan capacity, and chargeback costs.
The OpenStack user, such as a developer, requests compute, storage, and networking resources that
can be quickly delivered through the software-defined infrastructure that OpenStack provides. Its a
full public IaaS cloud experience delivered privately. IT teams can further customize this experience
to best meet the needs of their users.
This is important because, as Forrester also notes, a successful dev/test cloud project requires IT
to deliver the same service experience as public clouds but paired with some added capability and
usability to incent users to switch. This means comparing the internal private cloud directly to a
public cloud rather than comparing it to in-house alternatives.2

PaaS
An IaaS like Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform gives developers much faster access to
computing resources than manual processes could provide a virtualized image or a physical server.
However, the developer is still being given what amounts to raw infrastructure. It still looks like
and has to be set up and maintained just like a traditional server, albeit one that was installed very
quickly. But Java and web developers dont usually care much about underlying infrastructure. They
just want to write apps in a suitable development environment. Thats where a PaaS like OpenShift
by Red Hat comes in.
OpenShift builds on top of OpenStack or other infrastructures. It takes advantage of Red Hat
Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss middleware, and all the associated work that makes it a productive and full-featured environment for Java EE development. OpenShift also lets developers work
with a wide range of other open source languages, frameworks, and tools such as PHP, Python,
Ruby, Maven, Jenkins, and Eclipse. Applications developed on OpenShift also maintain the flexibility
to transition from dev/test to production on a different infrastructureincluding physical servers.
OpenShift does all this while abstracting away platform details, such as operating system updates,
that are irrelevant for app writers.

2 Forrester, Four Common Private Cloud Strategies by Lauren E. Nelson October 2013

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WHITEPAPER Consider application development and test for your first cloud project

GOING HYBRID
Weve focused on implementing an on-premise cloud for dev/testoften as an alternative to
unmanaged public cloud usage. However, organizations are increasingly adopting a hybrid strategy that uses a combination of private and public cloud resources based on factors such as the
type of application, the data that the application accesses, and the ultimate deployment target.
In this case, it is often important to maintain a consistent environment across the providers you
are usingincluding your internal, on-premise one. Red Hat helps you do so by providing Red
Hat Enterprise Linux through the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program. This allows you to
deploy a consistent, tested runtime across your different environments that is fully supported by
a commercial vendor. In addition, update and problem remediation processes are in place wherever your application is being developed or deployed into production.

CONCLUSION
Todays IT professionalsof all levelsface considerable challenges. However, perhaps none of
these challenges is greater than breaking down the traditional barriers preventing them from
delivering applications and new business services faster. Enabling developers through a dev/test
cloud is a practical, achievable starting point for a cloud implementation.
Meeting this dev/test challenge goes beyond technology of course. In that respect, it can help
serve as a template for cloud projects more broadly. Implementing a cloud means involving the
entire business. What are the most pressing business needs? What manual processes and approvals govern provisioning new resources today and how can they be minimized or eliminated?
And it requires working with the end users, in this case developers, to ensure that their needs will
be met at the end of the project. Because if they arent, youll be back where you beganwith
unmanaged, ad hoc, public cloud use. Because the public cloud is the benchmark against which
youll be measured.

ABOUT RED HAT

Red Hat is the worlds leading provider of open source solutions, using a community-powered
approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, virtualization, storage, Linux, and
middleware technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting
services. Red Hat is an S&P company with more than 80 offices spanning the globe, empowering
its customers businesses.

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