Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 - (Page 22)

d02gulr_p6ds 12/12/08 10:46 AM Page 22 Core Technology by Nick Gulrajani and Darryl Bowler Software Development In the Cloud Cloud management and ALM Similar to how virtualization began to take hold in the engineering lab, cloud computing is Nick is a Senior Solutions Architect with CollabNet and can be contacted at nicholasg@ collab.net. Darryl is a Senior Systems Architect Consultant with CollabNet and can be contacted at dbowler@collab.net. taking root with the more experimental crowd in software development. The reason for this is obvious: Development teams are quick to jump onto any leading edge technology that solves their challenge of needing dynamic, flexible tools and processes. Development computing environments require more adaptability—systems specifically must accommodate shorter project sprints, be less static and more configurable-on-the-fly, and support collaborative principles—in short, on-demand resources that can be shared across teams, managed by development, and have traceability across projects. Access to flexible, on-demand cloud computing resources, either from a virtual private cloud within the corporate data center or from public clouds, can provide just such a flexible environment. While clouds are interesting on their own (who doesn’t want all of Amazon’s computing resources available to them?), having tools for managing cloud resources (such as tooling and workflow) is key. “Cloud management for development” brings teams the level of control and visibility necessary in this new landscape. With cloud management for development, teams ultimately drive the allocation and provisioning of their systems—on-demand—as they need them. They can utilize the pooled physical and virtual machine capacity of a cloud for more flexible automation and reuse across projects. This means less time spent configuring and finding errors when software moves from one stage to the next. The benefits of thinking of servers as “clouds” or “pools” of virtual resources and version-controlled configurations include: • Managing and controlling entire development, build, and test processes from one interface means capacity can be monitored and optimized. • Storing and managing profiles (configurations) as reusable assets across a project or across multiple projects, easily accessible by any developer in the project or organization. • Visibility from the project- and managementteam levels as to how the resources are being used, with the ability to charge back resources per project if desired. In this article, our focus is on how to manage virtual private clouds for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). We generally define virtual private clouds as groups of public or private server pools from your corporate data center or from public clouds like Amazon EC2. To these server pools, developers would apply some software stack or configuration required for their task at hand. A typical enterprise use case for managing their cloud might be: 22 Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l February 2009 http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Conversations Computing in the Clouds Software Development in the Cloud Videos and Oracle Forms 10g Parallel LINQ Decoupling C Header Files Effective Concurrency Disciplined Agility Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009

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