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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Development In the Cloud: A Practical Use Case Setting Up a Cloud Development Environment

Nick is a Senior Solutions Architect with CollabNet and can be contacted at nicholasg@collab.net. Darryl is a Senior Systems Architect Consultant with CollabNet and can be contacted at dbowler@collab.net.

Similar to how virtualization began to take hold in the engineering lab, cloud computing is taking root with the more experimental crowd in software development. The reason for this is obvious: Development teams are quick to jump onto any leading edge technology that solves their challenge of needing dynamic, flexible tools and processes. Development computing environments require more adaptability -- systems specifically must accommodate shorter project sprints, be less static and more configurable-on-the-fly, and support collaborative principles -- in short, on-demand resources that can be shared across teams, managed by development, and have traceability across projects.

Access to flexible, on-demand cloud computing resources, either from a virtual private cloud within the corporate data center or from public clouds, can provide just such a flexible environment. While clouds are interesting on their own (who doesn't want all of Amazon's computing resources available to them?), having tools for managing cloud resources (such as tooling and workflow) is key. 'Cloud management for development' brings teams the level of control and visibility necessary in this new landscape.

With cloud management for development, teams ultimately drive the allocation and provisioning of their systems -- on-demand -- as they need them. They can utilize the pooled physical and virtual machine capacity of a cloud for more flexible automation and reuse across projects. This means less time spent configuring and finding errors when software moves from one stage to the next. The benefits of thinking of servers as 'clouds' or 'pools' of virtual resources and version-controlled configurations include:

• Managing and controlling entire development, build, and test processes from one interface means capacity can be monitored and optimized.
• Storing and managing profiles (configurations) as reusable assets across a project or across multiple projects, easily accessible by any developer in the project or organization.
• Visibility from the project-- and management-team levels as to how the resources are being used, with the ability to charge back resources per project if desired.

In this article, our focus is on how to manage virtual private clouds for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). We generally define virtual private clouds as groups of public or private server pools from your corporate data center or from public clouds like Amazon EC2. To these server pools, developers would apply some software stack or configuration required for their task at hand. A typical enterprise use case for managing their cloud might be:

• To control costs, manage security, or supplement resources during peak use, engineering or project managers set up what clouds a project may have access to.
• Individual hardware resources can be assigned to a 'cloud' that now has the capacity of their combined resources. Dell class servers could be allocated to a development cloud, while HP blades with a higher service-level agreement and security could be allocated to a production cloud. The cost associated with a machine in the former is about $0.10 per hour while the latter is $0.25 per hour.
• A project manager (or admin) allocates portions of either cloud to projects as the development or production configuration. The manager can limit projects to certain clouds; for instance, services from the development cloud can be used for development purposes only.
• Finally, cost accounting data can be derived by tracking usage by project and user, so managers can optimize assets at varying stages and projects.
• Amazon EC2 can be used to extend resources temporarily (and at a very low cost).

To complete the concept of cloud management for development, let's also introduce the concept of Development Services or Build and Test Services. Development Services consist of code, build and test tools, applications, and infrastructure stacks that can be stored and managed as configurations or profiles, and applied to an available server. These profiles can be accessed and used globally and version controlled for consistency across the application development lifecycle. So Development Services are simply software configurations or profiles applied to an available server in the cloud, on demand.

1 Introduction | 2 Development In the Cloud: A Practical Use Case | 3 Setting Up a Cloud Development Environment Next Page

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