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“The overwhelming majority of successful

cloud projects focus on custom application

development and testing.”

GARTNER,

“CLIMBING THE CLOUD

ORCHESTRATION CURVE,”

JANUARY 2014

G00255434

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

With rare exceptions, there’s little question about whether you will adopt cloud computing in

some form. You will. Rather, the questions you are probably asking revolve around how best to

get started or, perhaps, how to start managing the cloud use that is already happening within

your organization.

For many, one good answer will be to start with a cloud for application development and test

(dev/test) because it:

• Can deliver benefits even at relatively modest scale points, offering the opportunity to start small.

• Provides an internal alternative to current public cloud use and thus can streamline and

standardize development workflows.

• Can be independent of production systems and processes—although they can be integrated

over time whether through adopting DevOps methodologies or other approaches.

Perhaps most importantly though, a dev/test cloud directly addresses one of the most press-

ing needs at many organizations: Improving developer productivity and accelerating application

development. In a rapidly digitizing world, delivering new applications faster and more efficiently

isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a key component of your business’ agility and, ultimately, your

ability to win against the competition.

Red Hat can help you get started with a dev/test cloud whether you want to build and operate

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® OpenStack® Platform, give

your developers a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with OpenShift by Red Hat, or use certified

Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss® Middleware products in a public cloud through the

Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program.

CONSIDER APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AND TEST FOR YOUR FIRST CLOUD PROJECT

Gordon Haff

WHITEPAPER

2redhat.com WHITEPAPER   Consider application development and test for your first cloud project

INTRODUCTION

When an organization decides to implement a cloud, its ultimate ambitions probably go beyond

application dev/test. But dev/test is often the starting point. And for good reason.

Dev/test tends to be a dynamic activity within an organization; new environments are stood up and

torn down all the time — certainly much more frequently than is normally the case with production

applications. Therefore, the agility and flexibility that a cloud can provide is especially valuable here.

At the same time, dev/test also tends to be, within some constraints, something of a sandbox with

new technologies and approaches — the subject of ongoing experimentation. What better place to try

out new infrastructure approaches before putting them into production?

Of course, we’ve seen this story play out before. When virtualization went mainstream in the late

1990s, it was pitched as a tool to let you develop and test on a variety of operating system versions

and types without needing a physical system under your desk for each unique instance. Furthermore,

if your buggy code corrupted an environment, you could just wipe the slate clean by firing up a new

image rather than rebuilding an entire system.

Over time, virtualization has gone on to be widely used in production. Cloud environments go

beyond virtualization by being more dynamic. By being more scaleable. By being hybrid. Most funda-

mentally, clouds introduce concepts such as catalogs of standardized services — defined as part of a

software-defined infrastructure — and offers them to consumers, such as developers, through a low-

touch, self-service interface.

Cloud adoption has parallels to the introduction of virtualization. Frequently, it first takes place

within organizations where delivering new IT services rapidly is both a strategic concern and directly

connected to revenue. And it will first be adopted within those organizations at the point where

those new IT services are created — in the application development groups.

WHY DEV/TEST MATTERS TODAY

There have long been companies whose businesses depended on custom software. That being the

case, their software development processes were hopefully something of a core competency. What’s

different today is that differentiating based on applications and other aspects of IT isn’t an outlier;

it’s increasingly the norm. The fact that routine functions — think customer relationship management,

for example — are now often outsourced in the form of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has only intensi-

fied the trend. Companies can now focus their resources on delivering services that can make a dif-

ference rather than on the mundane tasks that nonetheless somehow have to get done.

This reflects how we are seeing a great reimagining of business processes,manufacturing, using

data, and the connections between businesses and consumers, consumers and businesses, and

among consumers themselves.

Whether widespread automation of factories, 3D printing, mobile applications, predictive analytics,

or even the latest Internet-of-Things, the most successful businesses are doing innovative things with

IT. This means the application is ever more central to the business. And in a world where the pace of

change is seemingly on an ever upward trajectory, the difference between success and failure may

result from how many applications can be put into service and how quickly they can be put in service.

“Successful businesses perpetually seek a

competitive advantage, an edge over their

would-be market rivals. For many businesses,

developers will be that edge. Businesses that will be successful over

the next decade will be those that understand

and appreciate the importance of

developers. Whether they’re lowering costs

and accelerating infrastructure, building

the applications that make a platform

more compelling, or leveraging the APIs that drive revenues,

developers will be the determining factor

between success and failure.”

STEPHEN O’GRADY

REDMONK, THE NEW KINGMAKERS

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TODAY’S IT CHALLENGE

Yet, this sort of agility is not the norm. While virtualization alone has generally improved server

utilization, it often does relatively little to improve developer productivity or to accelerate

application delivery.

APPROACHES FOR DEV/TEST

Perhaps the most common reaction we’ve seen to this mismatch between what developers are

asking IT organizations to deliver and what those organizations are actually delivering is what’s

called shadow IT. Users are going straight to public clouds — bypassing IT organizations — and spin-

ning up needed compute resources, paying for it with a credit card. This may provide developers

with some temporary relief, but it can introduce security and compliance risks. It can also result in

applications that don’t interoperate or that can’t be easily transitioned to a production environment.

However, as Forrester notes, “Banning the use of unauthorized services will just lead to resentment

and more stealthy circumvention.”1 Rather, they counsel that “The most favored approach, accord-

ing to Forrester inquiries, is to provide an alternative environment to the public cloud, delivering

this agility in-house. But to successfully incent voluntary change, organizations must approach this

service as a cloud and not as an enhancement of the enterprises’ existing services.”

Organizations can deliver this agility in two complementary ways: By building cloud-style

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), such as that provided by OpenStack, and by delivering complete

development environments as a Platform-as-a-Service. Public clouds can also be added as part of a

managed, hybrid environment.

“In the best-case scenarios, developers

now can be productive in fewer than 15 minutes.

In these scenarios, I&O [Infrastructure

& Operations] professionals

are successful at transitioning public

cloud usage to its internal alternative.”

FORRESTER

“FOUR COMMON PRIVATE CLOUD

STRATEGIES” BY LAUREN E. NELSON

OCTOBER 2013

Tremendouspressure fromthe business toenable growth

Constantdemand fornew services(new apps)

Need toacceleratetime-to-marketfor applications

CL0060

1 Forrester, “Four Common Private Cloud Strategies” by Lauren E. Nelson October 2013

“We chose OpenShift as the PaaS

foundation for cloud offerings thanks to

its flexible, open source architecture, its minimal-

overhead application programming model,

and its excellent support for DevOps. Our teams

are finding OpenShift to be enterprise-grade,

scalable, stable, and productive.”

BRETT ADAM

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT,

PLATFORM, CA TECHNOLOGIES

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HOW RED HAT CAN HELP

Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio includes a variety of offerings to get you started building

a cloud for dev/test.

IaaS

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform builds on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide

an application platform for cloud workloads with a large ecosystem and advanced features for

writing new applications. OpenStack allows organizations to build a private cloud that has charac-

teristics of a public cloud, including self-service, on-demand access to computing resources. Using

OpenStack, an IT organization can, in effect, become a cloud provider to their internal users. At the

same time, IT maintains direct control over the infrastructure and can augment OpenStack capabili-

ties through a cloud management platform (CMP) such as Red Hat CloudForms to establish, monitor,

and manage policies, plan capacity, and chargeback costs.

The OpenStack user, such as a developer, requests compute, storage, and networking resources that

can be quickly delivered through the software-defined infrastructure that OpenStack provides. It’s a

full public IaaS cloud experience delivered privately. IT teams can further customize this experience

to best meet the needs of their users.

This is important because, as Forrester also notes, a successful dev/test cloud project “requires IT

to deliver the same service experience as public clouds but paired with some added capability and

usability to incent users to switch. This means comparing the internal private cloud directly to a

public cloud rather than comparing it to in-house alternatives.”2

PaaS

An IaaS like Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform gives developers much faster access to

computing resources than manual processes could provide a virtualized image or a physical server.

However, the developer is still being given what amounts to raw infrastructure. It still looks like

and has to be set up and maintained just like a traditional server, albeit one that was installed very

quickly. But Java and web developers don’t usually care much about underlying infrastructure. They

just want to write apps in a suitable development environment. That’s where a PaaS like OpenShift

by Red Hat comes in.

OpenShift builds on top of OpenStack or other infrastructures. It takes advantage of Red Hat

Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss middleware, and all the associated work that makes it a produc-

tive and full-featured environment for Java EE development. OpenShift also lets developers work

with a wide range of other open source languages, frameworks, and tools such as PHP, Python,

Ruby, Maven, Jenkins, and Eclipse. Applications developed on OpenShift also maintain the flexibility

to transition from dev/test to production on a different infrastructure — including physical servers.

OpenShift does all this while abstracting away platform details, such as operating system updates,

that are irrelevant for app writers.

2 Forrester, “Four Common Private Cloud Strategies” by Lauren E. Nelson October 2013

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux

OpenStack Platform enables us to react faster to customer

demands, and is instrumental for our

own internal cloud development needs.

The solution enabled us to build out our

own private cloud on a secure and scalable

foundation.”

YOSHI TAMURA,

PRODUCT MANAGER,

MIDOKURA

http://red.ht/1v484PF

Copyright © 2014 Red Hat, Inc. Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo, and JBoss are trademarks of Red Hat, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

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GOING HYBRID

We’ve focused on implementing an on-premise cloud for dev/test — often as an alternative to

unmanaged public cloud usage. However, organizations are increasingly adopting a hybrid strat-

egy that uses a combination of private and public cloud resources based on factors such as the

type of application, the data that the application accesses, and the ultimate deployment target.

In this case, it is often important to maintain a consistent environment across the providers you

are using — including your internal, on-premise one. Red Hat helps you do so by providing Red

Hat Enterprise Linux through the Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program. This allows you to

deploy a consistent, tested runtime across your different environments that is fully supported by

a commercial vendor. In addition, update and problem remediation processes are in place wher-

ever your application is being developed or deployed into production.

CONCLUSION

Today’s IT professionals — of all levels — face considerable challenges. However, perhaps none of

these challenges is greater than breaking down the traditional barriers preventing them from

delivering applications and new business services faster. Enabling developers through a dev/test

cloud is a practical, achievable starting point for a cloud implementation.

Meeting this dev/test challenge goes beyond technology of course. In that respect, it can help

serve as a template for cloud projects more broadly. Implementing a cloud means involving the

entire business. What are the most pressing business needs? What manual processes and approv-

als govern provisioning new resources today and how can they be minimized or eliminated?

And it requires working with the end users, in this case developers, to ensure that their needs will

be met at the end of the project. Because if they aren’t, you’ll be back where you began — with

unmanaged, ad hoc, public cloud use. Because the public cloud is the benchmark against which

you’ll be measured.

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