The way that any enterprise leverages dev/test is critical to their business-level IT strategy because, without proper testing for infrastructure updates or application development, there can be serious system impact and downtime. The larger challenge though is that it can be expensive and time-consuming to stand up and maintain the infrastructure environment. Any dev/test environment will also need to be patched and backed up just like a production environment, and it can be a lot of additional work and overhead. All of the additional headache that can come with setting up a proper test environment sometimes leaves organizations cutting corners and skipping this step, but at what cost? Your deployment failure rate will skyrocket without testing which could lead to unhappy customers and missed timelines, so there has to be an easier way. Let’s do some discovery.
Avoid Leaving Gaps in Architecture Design
As a practitioner, one of the things that I began doing instead of trying to stand up one larger and all-encompassing dev/test environment was to design my test environment into any system upgrade. The infrastructure could be on-premises or in the cloud and in my case cloud today; Cloud = Azure. This in itself ensured that at least my projects had the proper test environments that would help me exceed my expected 99.999% uptime and availability. Instead of handling dev/test on a per project basis and for consistency, having a process that allows all systems to have dev/test capabilities may likely be more effective long term.
What If There Was an Easier Way and This Could All Be in Azure?
Having an overarching strategy for all applications leaves no system without a proper dev/test environment. While that may at first sound expensive and overwhelming, the reality is that with the right toolset it doesn’t have to be. The even more interesting part is that you can leverage temporary cloud storage for your testing, and tear it down when your work is done. Let’s take a closer look.
Cohesity Dev/Test Leveraging Azure
The long and short of it is that if your environment has servers that are backed up by Cohesity, you can easily spin up the server into the cloud of your choice and you are on your way. Let’s break down the steps.
- Backup your server with Cohesity
- Register Azure as a “Source” in the Cohesity console
- Go to “Test & Dev” on the left side of the console, choose the machine, and click the “Clone” button in the upper right hand corner
- Once the system is online in Azure you can begin your testing or development
- When complete you can “Tear Down” the machine
Check out this brief demo to see how it works.
Wrapping Up!
We no longer need complex architecture to be able to test the latest system updates, or to properly develop our applications. With a simple backup and Azure as a registered source a business-level strategy can be deployed for your enterprise dev/test needs.
