Ravello Systems Uses Cloud Application Hypervisor To Facilitate Use Of Public Clouds For Development And Testing

On Wednesday, Ravello Systems announced the general availability of its application hypervisor technology that allows organizations to seamlessly replicate application infrastructures within public clouds to augment their development and testing capabilities. Ravello’s application hypervisor platform gives enterprises a new use case for the public cloud by providing a platform that not only migrates application infrastructures to public cloud environments, but additionally enables developers to manage testing as well. Once an application has been imported to a public cloud using Ravello, customers manage the public cloud-residing infrastructure through Ravello’s platform and user interface in order to create application blueprints, tweak application settings for the purpose of A/B and multivariate testing, and monitor the results of subsequent development testing and QA.

Key features of Ravello’s software platform include the following:

•The platform’s claim to fame involves the simplicity of its user interface for importing an application environment into a public cloud infrastructure. Whereas migrations to public clouds can often be complicated, costly and inaccurate, Ravello presents customers with a schematic user interface that allows customers to specify the parameters and configuration of their application as illustrated below:

•Since its Beta launch in February 2013, Ravello’s application hypervisor platform has been used by 2,000 enterprise users for a total of 30,000 applications. Application sizes range from just a few virtual machines to over 100 virtual machines.

•The GA version features enhancements to scalability, networking and storage in the form of “the ability to deal with hundreds of VMs per application, complex enterprise grade networking including VLANs/trunking, L2 appliances, and clustering/storage related features.”

•Ravello currently supports application migration to Amazon Web Services, Rackspace and HP Public Cloud, although it has plans to support Windows Azure according to CEO Rami Tamir, in an interview with Cloud Computing Today.

•Ravello’s user base has not favored any one of its default public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Rackspace or HP) over the others, thus far, according to Tamir. In other words, a disproportionate number of its customers are not leveraging Amazon Web Services, for example, as the favored platform for public cloud deployment.

•Ravello’s pricing is based on application size, complexity and optimization criteria (cost or performance) and includes the cost of the public cloud.

Based on the usage of its platform, Ravello has analyzed data regarding the comparative efficacy of public clouds within a cloud dashboard that compares metrics such as the average time to provision a virtual machine across select regions per cloud provider and the error rate of provisioning a virtual machine. The data is compiled and abstracted from Ravello’s user base featuring thousands of deployments of virtual machines across multiple public cloud systems.

Overall, Ravello’s GA announcement marks the release of an exciting, enterprise grade product to the rapidly growing cloud-based testing and development space. More importantly, however, the product illustrates yet another use case for the public cloud as enabled by technology whose user friendly interface simplifies the replication of application environments within public cloud settings for development and testing in addition to other potential use cases as well.