cloud-test: Accelerate development of complex applications and Android mobile clients with Ravello on Google Compute Engine

Google Cloud Platform Blog

Accelerate development of complex applications and Android mobile clients with Ravello on Google Compute Engine

Friday, April 25, 2014

Today's guest blog post comes from Hadas Birin, Director of Product Management at Ravello.Google Compute EngineRavelloCompute Engine, GCP blog image.png

Accelerating backend dev and test:

Every code commit can be tested instantly on a replica of the production environment as part of the Continuous Integration process (read more).

Multiple identical copies of the production environment can be spun up on Compute Engine to allow for parallel automatic/manual testing, resulting in a faster testing cycle. Environments can be shut down automatically when testing ends or left running for the developer to investigate in case a test has failed.

Developers can easily deploy into their own environment on Compute Engine from IDE/shell using Maven or REST API (with Ruby/Python bindings).

Accelerating mobile / web client dev and test:

Developers can run Android on Compute Engine to test their native and web mobile applications, do continuous integration and run scale tests of thousands of Android clients (read more).

Developers can test different browser versions including Chrome, Firefox, Safari - all in parallel using Selenium GRID with Selenium WebDriver - and save tremendously relative to specialized browser testing services (read more).

Accelerating dev and test for existing complex applications from private data centers without any modifications:

Existing VMs (say from VMware) can be uploaded onto Ravello and run on Compute Engine. Ravello provides the VMs with the same network and storage setup they expect to get in the private data center. No change to the VMs is required (read more).

Developers can utilize Compute Engine to develop and test on existing applications without the need to restructure them for public cloud.

The technologyKVM

High-performance nested hypervisor – uses dynamic binary translation to run guest VMs unmodified on top of any cloud hypervisor.

Software-defined network – provides a virtual fully fenced network that may include static IPs, multiple subnets, routers, switches, DHCP, DNS, firewalls and L2/L3 network/security appliances added by the user.

Storage overlay – manages a distributed object store and connects it to the cloud provider’s local block storage.

Management layer - provides the UI and API to create and manage multi VM environments and publish them to various cloud providers.

Getting started

Export your existing VMs from VMware, and upload them into your account. Alternatively, use one of our publicly available images and add some Chef recipes to set it up.

Create a new ‘application’ – this would be your fully fenced environment. Then, drag and drop selected VMs from the library into the application.

Select each VM in the application, update its IP and mask, and choose which ports would be open for external access on this VM.

Publish the application to Compute Engine. After a few minutes – login and play with your application.

Save this application as ‘blueprint’ (a snapshot of the entire environment, including all VMs and the network definitions). Using this blueprint, you may spin up identical copies of this whole environment with one click.