ISVs and enterprises know the benefits of using the public cloud. If creating an exact copy of their data center application (a VMware or KVM-based multi-VM application with complex networking) and deploying it in AWS or Google Cloud wasn’t the immense challenge that it is, the upside would be huge. Ravello enables these organizations do just that - without conversions or cloud migrations, Ravello’s HVX encapsulates applications complete with complex networking. Powered by nested virtualization and software defined networking, these workloads can run unmodified in the public cloud.

Thus, engineering teams gain agility with the ability to burst into the cloud for development, manual and automated testing and continuous integration; with unlimited infrastructure resources and a world-encompassing presence through multiple geographic regions, training managers are spared both the capacity planning requirement and capacity limitations, and sales engineers gain the fidelity of their demo and PoC environments are not required to compromise the quality of the demo, increasing their success rate.

Identical environments with self-contained cloud capsules

HVX, Ravello’s distributed hypervisor infrastructure normalizes the public cloud and the data center from the application perspective. It exposes the same computing, network and storage services to the multi-VM application as if it were running internally. As a result, development and test environments deployed in the public cloud are replicase of production application running in the data center - enabling truly representative testing at a much faster pace.

Same networking

The complex application running on AWS or Google Cloud with Ravello has an overlay network. Network configurations are automatically set up with a virtual switch. The overlay network is identical to the data center environment including multiple subnets, routers, static IPs, VLANs and supplemental services such as DHCP and DNS servers. Thus, the application does not depend on the cloud providers’ network topologies or configurations.

Sharing and collaboration: snapshots and blueprints

HVX encapsulates an application’s compute, networking and storage making it easy to spin up the entire application and its environment as many times as required in the public cloud. Traditionally, cloning a multi-tier application requires manual effort or scripting to individually clone each VM and then configure the networking and storage. Ravello saves a blueprint of the application so that a new instance of that application can be automatically spun up on demand.

With these snapshot and blueprint features, developers and test engineers can easily collaborate. They can re-use the same blueprint, as well as save and share new blueprints as they make any changes to the application environment itself. QA and development teams can version control and easily collaborate to reproduce and fix bugs. Additionally, remote teams can collaborate on live instances simply by sharing a link to the running application in the cloud.

Automatic automation: RESTful API

Ravello delivers APIs to enable further automation and integration with other systems such as Chef/Puppet or Jenkins. For example, you can parallelize testing and avoid your CI queue buildup by using the API to spin up a new environment on every code commit, run your automated tests and shut down the environment after the tests are completed. With this programmatic access you can easily treat your infrastructure like code.

To learn more about the benefits of using the public cloud with Ravello, reach out to us, or start your free trial and see how you can take your applications to the cloud to run development environments, test environments, virtual training labs and sales demos.