Running your Dev&Test environment on the Cloud: Visual Studio Online

Editor's Notes

• #6: Ask yourself the process to provision dev and test environments in your organization today.Speed. Its not uncommon to wait weeks or more to get a virtual machine provisioned.Scale. What if you asked IT to have your own development environment of three servers? What if everyone on your team wanted their own environment? What if QA did as well? And, what if you wanted to do some load testing, so in addition to the application environment, you also need several beefy machines to simulate user load.Economics. Your organization may implement departmental chargebacks or something similar, so you know roughly what it costs to assemble and maintain the environments above. The cloud puts this capability in your control and your budget – and Microsoft will give you amazing value.
• #7:  (2 minutes)Why should I care about dev/test? Development & test is the #1 and most important workload in the cloud. One of two things happen after they introduced to dev/test in the cloud: 1) go to production on-premises or 2) go to production in the cloud. Either way, they have a better understanding of the cloud which is the right road we want to lead our customers down.Here’s an easy way to do this - an IT administrator or a developer can use the Windows Azure Management Portal to create VMs in the cloud (step 1). Those VMs are created using Windows Azure Virtual Machines, the platform’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering. Developers can supply their own VM images as ordinary VHDs or use VHDs provided by Windows Azure, with support for both Windows Server and Linux. Once the VMs exist, developers and testers can use them to build and test a new application, customizing the VMs as they see fit (step 2). Why would you want to do this? Two main reasons - low cost and speed. Windows Azure VMs are available to their users in a few minutes, while deploying VMs in an organization’s own datacenter can take days or weeks. Also, an organization pays for public cloud VMs by the hour, at prices ranging from $0.02 to $1.10 per hour. This is relatively inexpensive, and the VMs can be shut down when they’re not in use, making them even cheaper. Furthermore, with a gallery of images to readily choose from - like Windows Server, SQL Server, and various Linux distributions - your developers can quickly grab the images and start building or testing applications. In addition to using VMs in Azure to build a test and dev environment, your developers can rapidly create apps using the various other services that would usually require time to set up on-premises. For example, there are ready- to-use-services in Windows Azure such as caching or NoSQL databases or SQL Database which are offered as services. Typically, if you had to setup a development environment on-premises, you’d need up servers for all of these and you’d need licenses. With Azure, you eliminate all of this and give your developers a developer friendly environment. Benefits:Deliver Faster. Agile development with no waiting for IT, new hardware, or availability of existing dev/test boxes.Cost. Eliminate cap-ex expense and yet build test environments that scale better than ever.Use Existing Tools. Continue using the development languages, tools and lifecycle technologies you are using today. Test Better.Build bigger test environments that simulate real customer load including spikes without resource contention on the cloud’s “infinite” resources.Leave Production Alone.Prevent dev/test apps from affecting on-premise production performance. Even virtualized on-premise test workloads can on-premise production on shared machines.Access Existing Resources - Securely network from the cloud to on-premise to test against systems of record if necessary.Deploy Anywhere with No Lock-in. Once testing deploy either in the cloud or on-premise