By: Jennifer Galvin
A few weeks ago I was discussing mobile app development and deployment with a friend. This particular friend works for a company that develops mobile applications for all platforms on a contract-by-contract basis. It’s a good business. But one of the key challenges they have is the time and effort required to install a client’s development and test environment so that they can start development. Multiple platforms need to be provisioned. And development and testing tools that may be unique to each platform must be installed. This results often in needing to maintain large teams with specialized skills and having to maintain a broad range of dev/test environments.
I have always been aware that VMware’s vCloud Suite can speed up deployment of applications, (even complex application stacks), but I didn’t know if long setup times were common in the mobile application business. So I started to ask around:
“What was the shortest time possible it would take for your development teams to make a minor change to a mobile application, on ALL mobile platforms – Android, iPhone, Windows, Blackberry, etc?”
The answers ranged between “months” and “never”.
Sometime later, after presenting VMware’s Software Defined Datacenter vision to a tech meetup in Washington, D.C. a gentleman approached me to discuss the question posed. While he liked the SDDC vision, he wondered if I knew of a way to use vCloud Suite and software controlled everything to speed up mobile development. So I decided to sketch out how the blueprints and automated provisioning capabilities of the vCloud Suite could help speed up application development on multiple platforms.
First, let’s figure out why this is so hard in the first place – after all, mobile development SDK’s are frameworks, and while it takes a developer to write an app, the SDK is still doing a lot of the heavy lifting. So why is this still taking so long? As it turns out, there are some major obstacles to deal with:
- Mobile applications always need a server-side application to test against: mobile applications interact with server-side applications, and unless your server-side application is already a stable, multi-tenant application that can deal with the extra performance drain of 32 developers running amok (and you don’t mind upsetting your existing customers), you’re going to need to point them at a completely separate environment.
- The server-side application is complex and lengthy to deploy: A 3-tier web application with infrastructure (including networking and storage), scrubbed production database data to provide some working data, and front-end load balancing is the same kind of deployment you did when the application initially went into production. You’re not going to start development on your application any time soon unless this process speeds up (and gets more automated).
Let’s solve these problems by getting a copy of the application (and a copy of production-scrubbed data) out into a new Testing area so the developers can get access to it, fast. vCloud Suite provides a framework for the server-side application developers to express its deployment as a blueprint, capable of deploying not just the code, but all the properties to automate the deployment, and consumes capacity from on-premises resources as well as those from the public cloud. That means that when it comes time to deploy a new copy (with the database refreshed and available), it’s as easy as a single click of a button.
Since the underlying infrastructure is virtualized, compute resources are used or migrated to make room for the new server-side application. Other testing environments can even be briefly powered down so that this testing (which is our top priority) can occur.
Anyone can deploy the application, and what used to take hours and teams of engineers can now be done by one person. However, we are still aiming to deploy this on all mobile platforms. In order to put all of our developers on this challenge, we first need to ensure they have the right tools and configurations. In the mobile world, that means more than just installing a few software packages and adjusting some settings. In some cases, that could mean you need new desktops, with entirely different operating systems.
Not every mobile vendor offers an SDK on all operating systems, and in fact, there isn’t one operating system that’s common to the top selling mobile phones today.
For example, you may only develop iOS applications using xCode, which runs only on Mac OSX. Both Windows and Android rely on an SDK compatible with Windows, and each has dependencies on external libraries to function (especially Android). Many developers typically favor MacBooks running VMware Fusion to accommodate for all of these different environments, but what if you decide that to re-write the application quickly, you require some temporary contractors? Those contractors are going to need those development environments with the right SDKs and testing.
This is also where vCloud Suite shines. It provides Desktop as a Service to those new contractors. The same platform that allowed us to provision the entire server-side application allows us to provision any client-side resources they might need.
By provisioning all of the infrastructure at once, we are now ready to redevelop our mobile app. We can spend developer time development and testing, making it the best app possible, instead of wasting resources for work environment deployment.
Now, let’s think back to that challenge I laid out earlier. Once you start deploying your applications using VMware’s vCloud Suite, how long will it take to improve your mobile applications across all platforms? I bet we’re not measuring that time in months any longer. Instead, mobile applications are improved in just a week or two.
Your call to action is clear:
- Implement vCloud Suite on top of your existing infrastructure and public cloud deployments.
- Streamline your application development process by using vCloud suite to deploy both server and client-side applications, dev and test environments, dev and test tools, and sample databases – for all platforms – at the click of a button.
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