Building automation tools for the purpose of developing and testing applications can be hampered by differences in the organization of local data center infrastructures and cloud services. Ravello Systems corrects this problem with its Cloud Application Hypervisor, provided via a SaaS model.

Ravello has accelerated its SaaS offerings with new plug-ins and RESTful APIs to provision entire multi-virtual machine environments, along with networking and storage, in the cloud. The company added new Apache Maven plug-in, Ruby and Python programming support, and Continuous Integration (CI) systems including Bamboo, Jenkins and Teamcity.

Part of the datacenter inconsistency is simply the nature of IT and the expectation that systems will have problems. Preparation and agility come in helpful whether the goal is quickly adopting DevOps principles, automating the infrastructure, capacity restraints in the datacenter, or hosted virtualized resources. In the cloud, one needs to wait and be prepared of the problems at all levels, from launch to the end.

With these new plug-ins from Ravello, developers can instantly provision a complete clone of their existing on-premise production application and deploy it in the public cloud. The Apache Maven plug-in integrated with Ravello’s rich APIs allows developers to build, deploy, test and document from a central repository.

The cloud hypervisor has the ability to extend automation to the infrastructure level. The Cloud Application Hypervisor is based on software-defined networking and storage, as well as high-performance embedded hypervisor HVX, which represents an additional layer of software that performs binary translation. The new Maven plug-in and the availability of Ruby and Python bindings extend cloud hypervisor offerings and enables extreme CI on production clones in the cloud.

“The public cloud with its infinite capacity is very promising for continuous integration, but it’s an inherently different environment than what you have on premise,” said Gil Hoffer, VP of R&D, Ravello Systems. “Your application might have multiple subnets, multiple network cards per server and specific storage requirements. With Ravello we abstract away the differences between the private and public clouds, and have built-in automation for provisioning and deploying those multi-tier applications in the cloud.”

In addition, the use of RESTful APIs can provision more resources for developers to start and stop applications as needed, execute the tests automatically, and easily integrate with CI servers such as Jenkins, Bamboo or Teamcity right from the integrated development environment. Enterprise developers can create full replicas of multiple virtual machine applications without modification.