Cloudcast - Cloud Computing and Virtual Lab Management

Unlocking the Power of the Cloud for Application Development

Virtual Lab - November Release Now Live!

The November 2008 release of Skytap Virtual Lab went live today! A list of major enhancements present in the November release is provided below. As always, thanks for your continued input and feedback on the product!

Configuration Management

One-Click Snapshots: Configurations can now be snapshotted with a single click. You no longer need to suspend or shut down your configuration in advance to snapshot your virtual machines.

Snapshot Partial Configuration: Want to snapshot a subset of a configuration? You can now pick and choose which virtual machines will be included in your snapshots.

Power Off Button: You can now forcibly shut off a configuration or virtual machine, much like pulling the power cord from a physical computer, with the “Power Off” button. Additionally, we have modified the behavior of the existing Shutdown button to try to shut down your virtual machine through the pre-installed VMware Tools only.

Assets

Remote Shared Drive/FTP: Remotely access your shared drive account via FTP in order to more simply manage the files your virtual machines can access.

Public Assets: Looking for software on Virtual Lab? We now offer a public assets area where you can find common software: browsers, tools, debugging aids and more.

Projects

Project Improvements: You can now determine the visibility or scope of assets, templates and configurations to determine which projects the items belong to. Additionally, projects now feature an improved layout and a list of all project members.

User Experience

Site Rebranding: Incorporate your logo and company name into Skytap Virtual Lab in order to better provide training, demo, sales, proof of concept and lab capabilities to your users and customers.

New Visual Design and Improved Usability: Virtual Lab’s user interface has been overhauled to simplify common operations, consolidate all actions that can be performed on each page, and reduce the number of clicks necessary to accomplish tasks. Virtual Lab now features a toolbar across the top of every page where you will always be able to find page-wide controls.

Skytap Announces Integrated Platform for Professional Developers

LOS ANGELES, CA – October 27, 2008 – Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based virtual lab solutions, today announced it will demonstrate integration with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System at the 2008 Professional Developers Conference (PDC) held in Los Angeles from October 27-30. Effective immediately, Microsoft developers can log into Skytap’s Virtual Lab Platform to access Windows desktop and server virtual machines on demand, and easily set up and tear down virtual labs for software development and testing using Visual Studio. Skytap provides Microsoft developers the flexibility to run applications unchanged on any version of Windows without rewriting developer code, a typical limitation with most cloud infrastructure environments.

Sell full press release here.

The Cloud Wars: Who Will Win?

Today, Microsoft announced its Windows Azure cloud computing offering, further validating the market for cloud-based platforms. Given the multitude of major players in this market, including Amazon and Google, and the speed of innovation, we should see some major advances in cloud technologies which will greatly benefit customers. But who will be big winners (and losers) in this market?
First, it’s useful to define what cloud computing is. There are some excellent definitions of this (for example, see Wikipedia’s definition) which include the key characteristics of cloud computing and the various components in the cloud computing stack. An important takeaway from this is that there will be multiple winners that deliver different parts of the stack and that segmentation will occur based on customer needs. Obviously, different companies will make bets on different segmentation theories and how they can competitively differentiate themselves. Let’s look at one segmentation of the cloud computing market to discuss winners and losers:

• Traditional Hosting: The traditional hosting market includes Web hosters, co-location, and managed providers. There will still be a segment of the market that still demands these services, but many customers will start to migrate to cloud offerings that offer lower cost of ownership and more flexibility. The winners in this market will diversify their portfolio of offerings and move up the cloud stack (for instance, SAVVIS and Rackspace) and the losers will likely fail to evolve fast enough to meet competition from the new cloud providers.

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service: These providers deliver raw computer infrastructure on demand to companies. Amazon has defined this market with its EC2 offering and we’re now seeing significant innovation in how underlying infrastructure is offered. The key to winning in this market will be scale and operational efficiency, in addition to customer service for those customers willing to pay for it. The likely losers will be smaller cloud providers that can’t match the economies of scale of the major players or specialize to serve specific high-value market niches.

• Platform-as-a-Service: The Platform-as-a-Service vendors provide new proprietary cloud platforms for developers and offer a range of services including run-time platforms, Web service integration, storage, scalability, state management and instrumentation. These new offerings will require applications to be rewritten for the cloud and create a risk of vendor lock-in for companies that use them. Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com are currently the major players in this space and will likely all be successful given their focus on open source, .NET and business application platforms respectively. The losers are likely to be the smaller vendors that can’t deliver the breadth of platform features and economies of scale required to be competitive.

• ‘Open’ Cloud Solutions: A new breed of companies is emerging which solve specific business problems with cloud computing solutions, whether that is providing virtual IT labs, virtual desktops, or cloud management services. These providers provide a much more complete solution than raw infrastructure, including management, automation and orchestration capabilities, integration with existing business processes and systems, and an application layer to allow a broad range of users to interact with virtual machines. Supporting existing multi-tier applications and heterogeneous virtualization platforms will be an important factor to win in this market. The winners will provide first class integration to existing on-site environments and provide a robust management and automation layer and the losers will fail to innovate on technology that fundamentally improves the efficiencies across the IT lifecycle.

There are obviously lots of other solutions that will emerge to solve challenges around the cloud computing paradigm, including security and auditing, cloud management and standardized billing. However, it’s clear to us that given the enormous benefits that cloud computing offers, the pace of innovation and market traction will lead to new solutions that were unimaginable just a few years ago. With the current financial crisis and the cost savings achievable with ‘cloud economics’, companies that rapidly innovate and keep a clear focus on customer value will be the big winners in this new market.

Skytap Integration with Visual Studio Team System

Here’s a 2 min screencast to show the Visual Studio Team System integration we are demoing at Microsoft’s PDC today.

VSTS Integation Screencast

What is Infrastructure-as-a-Service?

Wikipedia defines Infrastructure-as-a-Service as ‘the delivery of computer infrastructure (typically a platform virtualization environment) as a service’.

I believe we’ll see an evolution of offerings that build on the IaaS category. The two leading use cases right now are app/web site hosting and testing/training/demo. For app/web site hosting, a service provider should support standard operating system VM images, a basic UI, load balancing, environment configuration and an API for management.

For the testing/training/demo solutions there are some other important capabilities required that build on the IaaS layer:

* Self-service UI / provisioning – users aren’t necessarily highly technical, so a self-service UI is needed to enable environment set-up and configuration.
* Hybrid cloud/on-site capability – applications often need access back to on-site services, such as mainframes or internal web services. A configurable VPN gateway enables this
* Full architectural control – many hosting cloud services force architectural decisions around storage, networking, and supported platforms. To be able to run your existing applications in the cloud, you need full architectural control over networking configuration, OS platforms, databases, queuing services, load balancing etc.
* Snapshot and automation – the ability to snapshot entire multi-machine configurations and automate the set-up and tear-down of environment is essential for highly dynamic environments such as test/training etc.

Over time, these capabilities will also be very important in production environments, but the underlying virtual infrastructure isn’t there just yet. Imagine the ability to snapshot an entire server configuration when a production issue occurs and send to support for resolution and debugging. Or the ability to migrate staging environments straight into production with the click of a button. Disaster recovery is also another important use case these types of capabilities will enable. Over the next few years, I believe we’ll see all these capabilities supported in solutions that build on Infrastructure-as-a-Service, enabling production environments to be transitioned to the cloud and the benefits of lower cost and true scalability to be achieved.

-Ian

Skytap Announces ISV Alliance Program for Cloud Computing

Skytap today announced its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Alliance program to enable on-demand distribution of commercial software solutions through its Virtual Lab platform. Skytap’s initial ISV partners, including Appistry, AutomatedQA, Borland, iTKO LISA, SmarteSoft and SOASTA, will make available their solutions as for-fee titles in the Skytap Library. Skytap’s Virtual Lab automation platform, combined with these for-fee titles, enable customers to dynamically spin up entire IT environments, complete with industry leading ISV tools, for testing or training labs.

Read the full press release here.

Skytap at VMworld

We had an incredible show at VMworld and a huge amount of interest given the vCloud announcement. I included a couple of pictures below from the show. You can read our vCloud press release here.

Congratulations to Tim Suttle from TechSoup who won the Nintendo Wii drawing!

Skytap Announces Worldwide Resell Agreement with SAVVIS

Skytap, Inc., the leading provider of cloud-based infrastructure solutions, today announced a strategic alliance with SAVVIS Inc., a global leader in IT infrastructure services for business applications, to resell Skytap’s Virtual Lab service. The alliance enables SAVVIS customers to quickly and cost effectively conduct software development and testing in the cloud using Skytap’s Virtual Lab Platform and subsequently run these applications in production as part of SAVVIS’ new software as a service (SaaS) hosting platform and enablement services (announced separately by SAVVIS today).

Read the full press release here.

Skytap Showcases ‘Hybrid’ Cloud Service and Joins VMware vCloud Initiative

Today at VMworld in Las Vegas, Skytap, Inc., a leading provider of cloud-based virtual infrastructure solutions announced it has joined the VMware vCloud Initiative to participate in developing an integrated set of services via standard APIs to allow the seamless extension of traditional IT into the cloud. Skytap’s existing cloud-based Virtual Lab platform enables organizations to adopt a “hybrid” IT model whereby cloud resources can be used to replace existing high-cost, dynamic environments such as application QA, pre-production, training and IT prototyping environments. By joining the VMware vCloud Initiative, Skytap is looking to work closely with VMware on standardized APIs to ensure easy migration of virtual environments from onsite IT to the cloud.

Read the full press release here.