If you are a test engineer, we hope to meet you this week at the Software Testing Analysis & Review East Conference, otherwise known as STAREAST. As a silver level sponsor, we’ll be exhibiting at booth 17, so please come by to meet us.
Join us at DeployCon and Cloud Connect in Santa Clara
We’re in the Bay Area attending and speaking at DeployCon & Cloud Connect this week. At DeployCon, our own Benny Schnaider, co-founder, president and chairman of the board of Ravello Systems, is a guest panelist for a fireside chat on PaaS visibility. If you are interested in learning how you can get the benefits of the ease of use and standardization of a PaaS and yet maintain complete control, flexibility and visibility of the underlying infrastructure, come and join us.
Meet us at EclipseCon 2013! Learn about using the cloud to develop and test on-premise applications
This week we’re in Boston and a proud silver sponsor at EclipseCon 2013. We are here to show attendees about the benefits of using the Ravello Systems as part of your development and test process.
On Thursday, I’m hosting a session on using the cloud to develop and test on-premise applications. A lot of enterprises face internal capacity constraints around development and test resources. As a result, developers end up sharing environments, not testing enough, and projects get delayed. Ideally, enterprises would be able to use the public cloud to augment their internal capacity. However, the public cloud is a completely different environment, so it’s difficult to develop in the cloud and deploy back on-prem.
Attending PyCon this weekend? Come visit us at booth 255
We are excited to attend PyCon 2013 as a silver sponsor. We want to help Python devops learn how Ravello can help development in the cloud – so please stop by our booth and we would be happy to provide a demo or answer any of your questions.
The Unbearable Lightness of Cloud Lock-In
Many IaaS providers now offer a variety of features and services, such as databases, storage and networking, from which the user can pick and choose. Amazon Web Services, the most popular infrastructure cloud, offers the broadest set of services, bordering on being a Platform-as-a-Service provider.
When using a cloud such as AWS, the user faces a choice. On one extreme, one can choose not to use any AWS-specific features: just run VMs, and maybe some storage services (block or object based). On the other extreme, one can choose to use all of the other services the application requires (Amazon RDS for a SQL database, DynamoDB for NoSQL, ELB for load balancing, auto-scaling, SQS for queuing and so on). Using these services speeds up an implementation and makes it scalable and highly-available much faster than rolling it out all on your own, but it also tightly couples the application to AWS. It would be difficult, expensive and time-consuming to move the app to a different cloud provider.
Ravello beta now open for everyone
After a couple of months of our private beta, lots of hard work, and some fantastic feedback from our users, we are very pleased today to announce the Ravello public beta. We have enabled some interesting new features and capabilities for this major release. Here is a quick snapshot.
TestMill: System Testing using Ravello
It’s been two months since I’ve left Red Hat and joined Ravello Systems in the function of Director of Product Marketing. So it’s high time to write a blog!
Ravello is working on some really interesting technology. At the core of what we do is our Cloud Application Hypervisor. In essence, it is a hypervisor for the cloud. The hypervisor runs in a distributed fashion on one or multiple cloud VMs. It provides multi-VM applications with a fully isolated environment on top of the public cloud. The environment includes compute, network, storage, and basic application services such as DNS and DHCP. As far as we know, virtualizing multi-VM applications this way on an already virtualized substrate has never been done before, at least not efficiently and for 64-bit VMs.
The IT productivity challenge
In the first two years of my career I designed three ASICs. Two on my own (including spec, architecture, design, verification and documentation) and one with a colleague. All three designs worked the first time. Back then I was extremely proud of this implementation speed.
The one “little secret” I did not tell you yet is that these three chips had a total of 50,000 equivalent gates combined. Today’s chip designers can accomplish such designs “before lunch”. In fact today’s designs are about 1,000x to 10,000x more complicated than my very first design about 25 years ago. Today’s chip designers have become so efficient thanks to better methodologies, tools, discipline and abstraction layers. With them they can easily reuse, duplicate, synthesize and debug their designs.
The same cannot be said for IT management. Although virtualization made significant enhancements in the past decade, by and large we still manage IT in much the same way we did 30 years ago. So there is a lot more to do, and perhaps it becomes even worse now that virtual machines are so easy to create, provision and abuse…
How Ravello uses Ravello to make dev/test in the cloud NOT suck! – part 1
Here at ravello we’re no different than any other startup which develops new and innovative software – we need to develop fast, adjust our plans as we go along, react to user feedback and be able to roll out versions as fast as possible. In other words – we need to be AGILE.
But our product is fairly complicated – it’s not your average web application – we’re talking a large distributed system, with a specialized hypervisor which runs on multiple cloud providers.
In this post we will describe some aspects of our test and dev mechanisms, which enable us to stay agile, and thus move faster.
HP Cloud now supported
We are extremely pleased to officially support the HP cloud. Ravello users can now run multiple instances of their applications in Amazon AWS/EC2, Rackspace or HP – with the same VMs, same networking, same everything!
