Development and Test is the application of various tools and practices when producing software. Regardless of the type of software that is developed; a proper set of development and test practices is the key to success. However, producing applications not only requires software engineers, but also IT resources, which are subject to constraints like time, money, and expertise. This is where Amazon AWS Development and Test comes into the picture. It is a reusable, automated and elastic way of pushing your application to the market.
The common traits which are seen developing a cloud application are:
- Disposable – projects start & stop, required only for short durations, need experts.
- Numerous – many environments, overlapping dev cycles, preservations of configurations.
When you use the Dev & Test in the AWS cloud, you benefit from:
- Unlimited elastic capacity – utilize lots of it when you need it
- Cost optimization – throw it away when you don’t need it, pay only what you use
- Preserve for future references – durable imaging & storage
Unlimited elastic capacity allows you to utilize lots of it when you need it. The elastic datacenter allows to set up development and test environment for rolling out applications to production. You can test at scale before production.
To effectively use the AWS Development and Test environment in your software life cycle, the following should be kept in mind.
Relevant AWS services which you require for a Dev & Test environment are:
- Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
- CloudFormation – creates application stack from reusable templates, creates resources in a dependency driven order, complete console support, predefined templates.
- Amazon APIs and SDKs – Support for multiple platforms like Microsoft .NET, Java, PHP, Python, iOS etc.
Source Control
Developing and running your source code requires a secure, easily accessible and durable environment. It should scale easily and be reusable to enable quick and fast development of your code.
Developers can self manage their source control through self installed EC2 instances, using community AMIs and AWS marketplace.
Development Environments
Developers require the suitable environment to build their applications. This can be achieved via CloudFormation. Here a VPC can be created using the predefined templates which can be integrated with the Configuration Management Tools (like Puppet, Chef etc).
You can replicate the production environment by leveraging the AWS APIs, Amazon Relational Databases, Point in Time snapshots and adopt Infrastructure as a Code strategy. This ensures that they deliver an application with high code quality, is performance tested and debugged.
Test
Amazon allows various test scenarios involving unit tests, load, performance, integration, smoke, UAT tests to be executed. You can automate them to reduce time and effort. The best testing approach would be to use automation using the APIs, use either the AMIs or the CloudFormation template matching the production environment.
Agile Development
The time to market is a crucial factor for businesses to adopt the Agile development approach for their applications. Here developers must optimize their code for rapid response to changes (requirements, design, logic etc). It requires high technical discipline with lots of automated processes.
The Agile concept involve continuous code integration, using the infrastructure as code ensuring continuous delivery.
Code integration requires a source control, a CI server that ensures automated evaluation of quality.
Infrastructure as code is just programmatic provisioning by API. Everything in AWS is an API. You can call and utilize any of the tools such as Chef, AMI, Puppet etc on any platform like Java, iOS, PHP and more. The benefits of infrastructure as code is speed, reliability, repeatability and reduced risk.
The prerequisites for continuous delivery is small batch sizes of the code base in the production environment delivered through automation.
On a closing note, development and test practices in AWS requires certain resources at certain times for the development cycle. Amazon Web Services offers a cost-effective alternative to traditional development and test infrastructures. Instead of waiting weeks or even months for hardware, you can instantly provision resources needed, instantly scale up as the workload grows, and release resources when they are no longer needed.
Sysfore Technologies can guide in implementing a Development and Test environment which suits your business needs and requirements. You can contact our cloud development experts by mailing us at info@sysfore.com or call us at +91-80-4110-5555.