Electric Cloud's private cloud development technology has this week been enhanced with the company's ElectricCommander 3.8 offering. Described as an application to bridge the gap between private cloud infrastructure and software development, ElectricCommander 3.8 provides developers with self-service and manageability tools to close the loop between operations and requirements.
To clarify what it means by this "gap" between IT and development, Electric Cloud points to the virtual and physical machines that IT operations provides at one level — and the tools and processes that developers must use to lash code together to build, test, and deploy quality software on time in the real-world.
Developers and IT can often work at odds says the company, but the rise of the so-called Development Operations team (or DevOps) acknowledges this problem and assigns ownership. In Electric Cloud's version of the truth, its ElectricCommander 3.8 is then in place to connect the machines, tools, and processes already in place and create a private development cloud where developers find precisely the services and resources they need.
"Enterprise IT organizations are accelerating their investment in private cloud computing and software development teams are going to be their most demanding users," said Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag. "Unfortunately, while most private clouds provide 'self-service compute resources' — for development, that hasn't translated to much more than a blank rack of servers."
According to Electric Cloud, ElectricCommander 3.8 accomplishes its claims via a process of workflow automation with a task automation engine to provide an environment to define any arbitrary tasks and the workflows between them. There is also parallel execution to enable compute intensive tasks to be executed in parallel. Plus there's also workload distribution and management engineering so that developers can schedule physical, virtual or cloud compute resources for software development tasks — and this allows developers to automatically get as many or as few compute resources as they need.
According to a November 2010 report by Forrester Research Inc. entitled, Companies Building Private Clouds Focus on Infrastructure but Not Operations, in the private cloud, enterprises are under investing in key areas such as automation, self-service, and tracking and reporting. "Evening out these investments and focusing on operational shortfalls can lead to better implementations sooner, which could drive differentiating value for their company," according to the analyst firm.
