IBM Offers Cloud-Based Resources for Developing and Testing Database Applications

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As every developer knows, applications need to be thoroughly tested during development and before they are deployed in a production environment. Setting up testing and development environments presents challenges for developers, however, and complicated, time-consuming procedures always introduce the risk that shortcuts are taken or mistakes find their way into the process.

Provisioning a development and testing environment takes resources and time. Computing resources need to be allocated to the testing environment. And in some organizations the testing environment needs to scale to support large, global teams collaborating on a project.

Free Download: IBM DB2 Express-C IBM DB2 Express-C is ideally suited for use in cloud environments. It offers core DB2 functionality, including the revolutionary pureXML data management capabilities. You can now take advantage of DB2 Express-C for powering your database and DAAS applications in the cloud environment.

Security for the testing environment is another challenge. Developers need to avoid using production data in their tests. The amount of data used in a test also needs to be restricted — just because the production environment is 5TB doesn't mean all of that data should be used in a test.

The biggest challenge that faces development teams that need an environment for developing, testing and performing QA on applications is consistency. As many as 30 percent of the problems found in application tests are related to inconsistency in the testing environment.

IBM recognizes these challenges force developers and IT staff members to devote more time to creating testing and development environments than they'd like. IBM also knows that cloud computing provides an opportunity to make this process easier for developers and DBAs who need to test their database environments.

Cloud computing introduces the capability to deliver computing resources on demand, meaning organizations can procure and start using hardware and infrastructure resources more quickly and less expensively than building a testing environment in their own data centers. Moving testing environments to the cloud also helps ensure their consistency, making testing more accurate and eliminating up to 30 percent of the errors in the process.

IBM's experience and expertise in cloud computing, databases and software development makes IBM a solid choice for development organizations that need to develop and test many types of applications. Here are some of the IBM products and services that developers can use to help test their database environments in the cloud.

IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud
The IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud provides enterprise customers with everything needed to develop and test application code. It is a dynamically provisioned and scaled elastic environment that is managed through a Web portal where you configure and manage your cloud resources, software images of IBM products and APIs.

In addition to interacting with IBM's cloud through a Web browser, developers like you can also access the cloud through a number of IBM Rational development tools, making it easier to reuse components and collaborate on development projects.

IBM DB2 on the Cloud
Developers know IBM DB2 as a leading database server that manages relational and XML data in Windows, Linux and UNIX environments. DB2 is also ideally suited for cloud deployments, and IBM makes it easy for developers to take advantage of DB2 in the cloud for developing and testing applications.

DB2 Enterprise Developer Edition is available on the IBM Smart Business Development and Test Cloud. It is designed for developing high-performing, robust, on-demand enterprise solutions. Small and medium-sized businesses can also take advantage of DB2 in the cloud. DB2 Express Edition and DB2 Workgroup Server Edition are available through Amazon Web Services (AWS). Users simply sign up online and pay with a credit card.

DB2 Express is an entry level edition of DB2 data server for the small and medium business market, and exploits up to 4GB of memory. DB2 Workgroup is deployed in departmental, workgroup or medium-sized business environments, and exploits up to 64GB of memory. DB2 Express-C, the no-charge community edition of DB2, is also available on both the Amazon and IBM cloud platforms.

The IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Masking and Test Data Management Solution
Development and testing environments in the cloud still need to protect data to ensure sensitive information isn't exposed during testing, development or QA. The IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Masking and Test Data Management Solution can be used to protect production data or subsets of data when users don't want to use a 5TB production database in a test.

Rather than generating test data to populate a database, the IBM InfoSphere Optim Data Masking solution masks production data or subsets of data so they're protected during the testing and development process. This means the relationships between two pieces of data remain intact —such as the relationship between a name and credit card number, even though the real name and credit card number were changed. This creates an environment in the test database that more closely resembles the production environment.

The IBM Business Partner Ecosystem
IBM is working with its partners to develop an entire ecosystem of tools for developers working in the IBM cloud. Current offerings include everything from development tools and security solutions to performance monitoring. IBM Business Partner RightScale created a cloud management platform, the RightScale Development and Test Solution Pack, to help developers get started in the cloud. It includes the DB2 database and Web Sphere Java application stack at no charge.

Conclusion
Creating consistent testing and development environments for database applications continues to be a challenge for many organizations. IBM's DB2 database is available on-demand in the public cloud for developers and DBAs at organizations of all sizes. With DB2 and a number of offerings from IBM and its partners, IBM is helping make the creation of testing environments easier, faster and less costly and helping customers get their products to production faster than ever before.

In a future article we'll discuss how organizations can leverage their own infrastructures to create similar private cloud solutions.