CloudShare recently announced the release of a self-service lab that enables customers to create customized environments for development and testing in ways designed to radically accelerate the time to market for new applications and accelerate cycles for bug enhancements and new releases. The announcement means that developers can now provision IT resources and infrastructures to meet their testing and QA needs on demand. With CloudShare’s self-service lab, developers can conduct testing that allows teams to freeze bugs and take snapshots of applications and databases in addition to running multiple tests in parallel on replicated infrastructures.
CloudShare CEO Zvi Guterman commented on the value proposition of the CloudShare labs by remarking on how they facilitate access to IT resources for testing as follows:
Limited and slow access to infrastructure causes delays in release cycles and puts testing at risk of being incomplete, resulting in bugs in production. Lack of access to IT infrastructure and the limitation of existing solutions remain huge barriers to rapid innovation. With CloudShare Labs, application development and testing organizations work faster and companies will find a competitive advantage by gaining access to IT resources at the speed of development.
Guterman underscores the importance of developer access to dedicated IT resources that support development and testing. But the real innovation of CloudShare Labs consists in its ability to deliver advanced QA functionality that allows developers to more expeditiously fix bugs by way of the following functionality:
•Multi-VM disks can be leveraged to freeze bugs, fix them and reinsert the corrected the version into the original application
•The ability to replicate master environments to isolate and rectify defects caused by incorrect configuration
•Cross-functional team collaboration by way of a web browser console
•Libraries and templates of applications for subsequent testing and reference
The larger point, here, is that CloudShare expands the options for application development and testing to the cloud and delivers an environment with targeted testing functionality that is compatible with the Jenkins continuous integration server and the Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Enterprises can leverage their VPN platforms to share testing results with geographically dispersed teams and stakeholders. In addition to testing, customers can use the CloudShare platform fundamentally for development purposes as well by spinning up infrastructures designed for agile development and testing by uploading their own VMs or using CloudShare’s library of templates for virtual machines.
Cloud Computing Today 