The Path to Cloud – An InApp Infographic on Cloud Migration
Highlights Cloud adoption is strategic SaaS adoption has more than quintupled IaaS and PaaS adoption reaching a tipping point Data wants to be bigger in the cloud Have questions? Contact the cloud computing experts at InApp to learn more.
Top 5 Cloud Computing Trends This Year (2016)
Top 5 Cloud Computing Trends This Year (2016) Have questions? Contact the cloud computing experts at InApp to learn more.
Microsoft Azure – A Global Enterprise-Grade Cloud Platform
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform created by Microsoft that is designed to run applications to be scaled out on the internet. Why Microsoft Azure Cloud? Microsoft Azure takes an application-centric view of cloud computing which means that it manages the entire life cycle of the application. From the initial design, development, and testing of the application to deploying it on the cloud, to monitoring and scaling that application when it is running out on the internet. Microsoft offers real-world experience with built apps and services such as outlook.com, Bing, Xbox Live, and Office 365 on cloud technology. All of these technologies are being used to build Azure. What’s with Microsoft Azure? Microsoft Azure is a broad stack of services that runs in all the data centers globally. Think of the different services as building blocks. These services can be categorized into 3 classes. The first is infrastructure services which are low-level building blocks. They are an abstract set of computer resources in the data center running virtual machines. The second is the data storage service that provides storage and data management capabilities to help your application manage all of its data in a reliable and scalable way. The third component is the developer experience where the infrastructure, storage, and all of the APIs are packaged in the cloud and made available to the developers. Some integration with Visual Studio is delivered in the form of an SDK that can be downloaded for a free trial and run locally. This means you can develop and test your application locally before you deploy it to the cloud. Benefits of Microsoft Azure: Applications can be developed and deployed within minutes which means one can get their apps out there in the market as quickly as possible. The speed and agility that this gives also mean that one can reiterate quickly to improve on their apps. It is open and flexible, provides first and best-class experience and support for Microsoft workloads, and embraces other open technologies. In addition to Java and .NET, it supports PHP, Python, and other languages. Excellent support for open frameworks like Hadoop, and web frameworks like Word Press, Joomla, and Drupal. Also provide 1st party SDKs for developing apps using Android, iOS, or Windows phones. It follows a utility model where you pay for only what you need and only when you use it. With this model, you can stop worrying about where your peak (limit) is, you can stop paying for things upfront and you can save a lot of money. Microsoft Azure Infrastructure services allow you to scale up to multiple instances using virtual machines. Developers can use these virtual machines to develop and test any of the applications. Websites can be built using Azure which acts as a powerful self-service platform. It is highly secure with enterprise availability, support for SSL, and active directory authentication. With Windows Azure mobile services one can easily and quickly build cross-platform mobile apps that scale. Finally, Azure helps one to understand the application and analyze it so that one can build a better version and deploy that to the cloud without entering any downtime. It is more economically viable as you need to pay for only what you use. This means that you have great cost savings and can achieve great efficiencies. To start please refer to Microsoft Azure training courses. Have questions? Contact the cloud computing experts at InApp to learn more.
Cloud Testing – Nuts & Bolts
Need for Cloud Testing – Issues and Challenges Traditional testing has limitations like latency, performance, concurrency, and planning issues and is way too expensive. Cloud testing is a big game changer and surpasses the challenges faced by traditional testing. It can be used to provide a flexible, scalable, and affordable testing environment at all times or on demand. Cloud testing typically involves monitoring and reporting on real-world user traffic conditions as well as load balance and stress testing for a range of simulated usage conditions. The availability of virtual machines eases the process of setting up, using, reusing, and running test setups. Complex test setups are available as stacked templates, making it easy to integrate complex automation into various processes to build complex cloud testing systems. Cloud testing is a great fit for an agile environment. It can leverage the whole life cycle of web or mobile app development, right from the beginning of development until the application is in production. Today, if you need to generate thousands of virtual users to test a specific web application then the number of servers required for that test can be deployed within a couple of minutes. Best of all, you only need to pay those servers for the duration of the test thus making it more economical and viable. Cloud testing is flexible enough that it can be used for continuous performance testing. Test maker runs tests in multiple cloud testing environments making it possible to manage performance from different geographical locations. Tester gets a real-time testing experience of applications on browsers and OS rather than simulated environments. Cloud testing eliminates the cost of building and maintaining a test lab for load and performance testing. If a specific test environment is required, just use it via the cloud. There is no need to provision expensive and difficult-to-manage quality test labs. Cloud-based testing poses different operational challenges in the real-world scenario. One of the major challenges would be creating an on-demand test environment. The current cloud technology does not have any supporting solutions that will help cloud engineers build a cost-effective cloud test environment. For scalability and performance testing, the current framework and solutions do not support the features such as dynamic scalability, scalable testing environments, SLA-based requirements, and cost models. Testing security is yet another concern inside clouds as security services become a necessary part of modern cloud technology. Engineers must deal with issues and challenges in security validation and quality assurance for SaaS (Software as a Service) and clouds. Integration testing in the cloud may not be performed due to lack of time or additional integration cost which subsequently affects the performance of the application. Cloud testing is under constant evolution, continuously bringing in new opportunities and challenges. It reduces the need for hardware and software resources and offers a flexible and efficient alternative to traditional testing. Finally, moving testing to the cloud is seen as a safe bet as it does not include sensitive corporate data and has minimal impact on the organization’s business activities. Migration of self-testing to the cloud would bring about a notion of test support as-a-service. Have questions? Contact the cloud testing experts at InApp to learn more.