Development and Testing Cloud with Nimbula Director

Development and Testing Cloud with Nimbula Director

A guide to a highly scalable, developer friendly private cloud deployment

Business Challenges

Organizations are increasingly using agile software development to get better products to market, faster. This requires a development platform that supports short development and testing cycles, easy distribution of new software and provides more features and tools for developers to increase productivity, such as orchestration and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).

Application development requires constant creation of new development sandboxes, new test environments and launching and de-provisioning of instances. Provisioning bottlenecks can occur when multiple development teams share the same infrastructure, slowin down the development process and wasting expensive developer time waiting for environments to become available.

Cloud computing addresses the provisioning issue with its high levels of automation, self service and rapid development cycles without sacrificing performance, security and compliance.

Nimbula Director provides an ideal development platform with advanced functionality, high levels of self-service and automation and sophisticated permissions management.

The Benefits:

• Self-service: End users define, set up and launch their own infrastructure (templates, instances, storage and networking resources), so that they get what they need in minutes instead of days or weeks.
• Security: All cloud activities are policy-based, allowing the right developers to access the right resources and perform the allowed activities.
• Quotas and Quality of Service Management: All cloud resources can be managed with predefined quotas which define the amount and type of resource usage permitted, ensuring the right application runs on the right equipment based on business needs.
• Automation: A highly automated cloud is key to an efficient development and testing cloud. Automation cuts down setup time, resulting in shorter development and testing cycles and faster deployment of new applications.
• Collaboration and Multi-tenancy: Multiple teams can work on the same infrastructure in complete isolation, but with the ability to collaborate and share objects in a controlled fashion. This allows teams within an organisation or across partner or related organizations to collaborate and share resources.

Solution Brief

Nimbula Director delivers self-service, elastic cloud software which lets developers self-service provision and deprovision their own instances and storage and networking needs in minutes, without having to talk to IT or open tickets. All cloud functionality is exposed to end users through a RESTful API, CLI and GUI, providing a completely self-service cloud.

Nimbula Director’s orchestration functionality lets developers define an application in terms of a series of actions and relationships on system objects (such as launching instances, defining security rules, etc.) which the system then manages over the lifetime of the orchestration. The orchestration service monitors the components and in case of a failure, automatically recovers and ensures the application continues to run. This enables developers to run complex applications without the usual cleanup and maintenance involved in the dev/test cycle, increasing productivity and time to market.

With Nimbula Director’s sophisticated permissions management, all activities in the cloud are policy based. End users are granted permissions by the tenant administrator, to ensure high levels of security and complete control over what is done in the cloud.

Nimbula Director’s federation engine enables end users to securely use the public cloud without the need for specific approval, based on their permissions, and without the need to enter credentials or to handle billing.

Our customers have seen a 90% speed up in development and testing time due to Nimbula Director’s self-service features and the ability to parallelize activities. Shorter time to market results in major cost savings for our customers.