Software Development In the Cloud

Setting Up a Cloud Development Environment

We now present an overview of some of the tools and principles to consider when modifying your own environment for development in the cloud. Basic principals include:

• All stakeholders should be able to see and make progress on the code and executables in real time without having to replicate data or change ownership.
• A version-control system should be integrated with build automation tools.
• Simple branching strategy (parallel development) for development, integration, and release work.
• Make incremental changes and test often.
• Focus on small releases that provide the most business value.
• Utilize aggressive milestone management, such as the agile imperative of time boxing (for more details, see the text box entitled 'Time Boxing').

Taking advantage of software development in the cloud does not require massive retooling--that's one of the benefits. You may already be using many of the basic collaboration and change-management tools commonly used by software teams worldwide. (As a disclaimer, many of the tools we talk about are those that CollabNet sells.) Table 1 lists the tools.

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Table 1: Tools for software development in the cloud.

In general, requirements for tools should include:

• Support for heterogeneous environments, so teams can have flexibility across the organization, based on specific project requirements.
• Adaptive to current workflows and tools. Developers and QA engineers want to stay in familiar environments.
• Access to complementary tools and configurations across the development lifecycle.

For instance, CUBiT (CollabNet's Cloud Management for Development Services) can be configured to manage a virtual private cloud with your own corporate computing resources, expanding to a public cloud such as Amazon EC2 if desired. This type of capability is key for automating any development environment. With such automation, overhead for software teams to obtain and manage computing resources is reduced with the Development Build and Test Services previously described. New systems can be provisioned from the predefined profiles within minutes while maintaining corporate security, auditability, and traceability.

Design goals for the cloud environment include:

• Teams must have autonomy over their own resources, and must have minimal delay in provisioning their own systems.
• Strict access controls so that resources are dedicated to project teams or to a dedicated purpose (such as build or test).
• Charge back for resources used. Even if the organization doesn't charge back, teams can begin to understand the resource costs associated with their projects.
• Using agile processes such as continuous integration (CI).
• Automated build and test.

Figure 3 illustrates how CUBiT manages development clouds of build and test services -- combinations of physical and virtual machines with profiles.

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Figure 3: Cloud management with CUBIT.

Software developers within their own projects have access to their own dedicated systems that are dynamically sharable among project members. CUBiT management features include visibility of all system resources within cloud, auditing, capacity monitoring, role-based access, and accounting with charge back. Profile management enables version control and traceability for configuring predefined development stacks within minutes.

Step 1: Configuring a virtual private cloud. Using CUBiT, you can configure multiple clouds for different use cases, and have the ability to control the usage of those clouds. For example, we could create clouds for continuous integration build systems and assign them as an exclusive resource to that project, or share it among any number of projects.

Step 2: Giving developers easy access to cloud resources through their IDEs. CollabNet provides a free plug-in to IDEs such as Eclipse and Visual Studio that lets you seamlessly access the source-code management tool, collaboration platform, and development services (Subversion, SourceForge Enter prise, and CUBiT, respectively) without having to leave your IDE. From the IDE, you can browse all system resources within a cloud or CUBiT domain, physical or virtual systems. The management interface can be viewed directly from within the IDE; in addition, the systems can be securely accessed.

Step 3: Creating reusable profiles for on-demand build and test services. By creating reusable predefined configurations explained as profiles earlier, systems can be consistently provisioned on demand, hence the concept of build and test services. Profiles are defined in an XML format and are maintained in a Subversion repository under version control, so systems can be restored exactly to a previous state if needed.

Example 1 shows how a continuous integration build system can be provisioned from CUBiT. This example installs Java SDK, CruiseControl, Apache Beehive, Apache Derby, and Tomcat -- a full development and build stack. Typically, such a system can be provisioned in less than 10 minutes, thus meeting the demands of an agile development team.

<rpms action="install"path=
"pbl://mgr/pbl/cubit_demo1/pub/cruisecontrol-apache/">
<rpm>jdk-1_5_0_15-linux-i586.rpm</rpm>
 <rpm>cruisecontrol-bin-2.7.3-1.i386.rpm</rpm>
<rpm>apache-beehive-1.0.2-1.i386.rpm</rpm>
<rpm>db-derby-10.4.2.0-1.i386.rpm</rpm>
<rpm>apache-tomcat-5.5.27-1.i386.rpm</rpm>
</rpms>

Example 1:A continuous integration build system.

Step 4: Using CUBiT Web Services to automate cloud provisioning for testing services. CUBiT has an extensive set of REST-based APIs that let you automate what would normally be complicated procedures. For example, you can dynamically provision build systems in the cloud, then destroy those systems once testing has completed. This is useful for testing milestone builds that require a 'clean' system in a known good state.

Step 5: Determining how cloud resources are being used and charged back. Finally, tools like CUBiT give teams and managers the ability for each system or profile to be used on an allocated/hour basis. Even if this feature is not used to charge development teams, it is still valuable for determining the usage and allocation patterns of your resources. In Figure 4, CUBiT graphically reports (in either a pie chart or table) who is using the resources in any given project and the associated costs. This ability becomes more important as organizations begin to dynamically allocate computing resources across projects that require managing their own virtual private clouds.

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Figure 4: CUBIT report.

Conclusion

Software development in the cloud brings adaptability and flexibility to any size project team. By utilizing some common software development tools and a new one that introduces the concept of cloud management and development services, teams can build their own cloud development environment with continuous integration automation and 'roundtrip' feedback to provide on-demand access and visibility across the development lifecycle.