Dr. Dobb's Journal - February 2009 - (Page 23)

d02gulr_p6ds 12/12/08 10:47 AM Page 23 • To control costs, manage security, or supplement resources during peak use, engineering or project managers set up what clouds a project may have access to. • Individual hardware resources can be assigned to a “cloud” that now has the capacity of their combined resources. Dell class servers could be allocated to a development cloud, while HP blades with a higher service-level agreement and security could be allocated to a production cloud. The cost associated with a machine in the former is about $0.10 per hour while the latter is $0.25 per hour. • A project manager (or admin) allocates portions of either cloud to projects as the development or production configuration. The manager can limit projects to certain clouds; for instance, services from the development cloud can be used for development purposes only. • Finally, cost accounting data can be derived by tracking usage by project and user, so managers can optimize assets at varying stages and projects. • Amazon EC2 can be used to extend resources temporarily (and at a very low cost). The cloud development use case encompasses the flow of defects/requirements through phases of development/builds/tests and back to submission of new requirements or defects by various stakeholders. Automation at any point possible is a key capability, including the ability to “turn on” and “rip down” virtual or physical systems as needed, in a cloud. Figure 1 illustrates the workflow for development in the cloud through the perspective of the various contributors, along with their collaborative and cloud management tools: 1. Business Analyst/Quality Engineer (BA/QE) submits defects/requirements. 2. Project Manager (PM) picks tasks, sets priorities, and assigns them to development. 3. Developers open their favorite IDE and view their tasks. They begin to work on the defect and write code. 4. Developers use the cloud-management platform to build and test code. 5. They merge code and change sets. 6. They commit code to a source-code management tool (here, Subversion). This triggers a continuous integration that takes place using the cloud management and build automation tool (Figure 2). 7. CI tool monitors for code changes (Figure 2). 8. Upon build failure, defect tracker is updated and notification is sent to the development team (Figure 2). 9. Upon successful build, the defect tracker is updated automatically. If the test succeeds, test results are e-mailed to PM/QE. If the test fails, QE is notified (Figure 2). Software development in the cloud does not require massive retooling To complete the concept of cloud management for development, let’s also introduce the concept of Development Services or Build and Test Services. Development Services consist of code, build and test tools, applications, and infrastructure stacks that can be stored and managed as configurations or profiles, and applied to an available server. These profiles can be accessed and used globally and version controlled for consistency across the application development lifecycle. So Development Services are simply software configurations or profiles applied to an available server in the cloud, on demand. Virtual Private Clouds So what part of this happens in the virtual private cloud? • Step 4 is where the developer may configure his own cloud system on demand for build and test. • Steps 7, 8, and 9—the CI tool and build automation—run on the cloud systems. • Once a build is successful, the artifacts are uploaded automatically to the Project Development In the Cloud: A Practical Use Case One use case for software development in the cloud combines the agile best practice of continuous integration (CI) and some common collaborative development tooling that has been used across companies of varying sizes, locations, and industries. This approach is scalable and flexible around the size of your development team and type of products you are building. Figure 1: Software development in the cloud workflow and stakeholders. February 2009 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 23 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

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.