Rightscale Adds Dev & Test Support To Beef Up Their Offering

Rightscale (See CloudAve’s previous coverage of Rightscale), the leading cloud management company, today announced their support for Development and Testing in the cloud. This is one feature that was lacking in Rightscale as they try to push themselves hard in the enterprise cloud marketplace. Skytap, the company that was focussing on Labs play earlier, has moved further ahead towards a more comprehensive solution. With today’s announcement, Rightscale is targeting organizations who are hesitant to adopt cloud computing in large scale but want to move non critical dev-test environments to the cloud.

In today’s agile environment, companies are expected to cut down time in their application release cycle. Whether they use agile development or not, compressing each stage of their application release cycle is proving to be crucial for maintaining the competitive advantage. However, provisioning of resources for app development and testing is proving to be a bottleneck and enterprises have already warmed up to push their dev-test to the clouds. In order to take full advantage of the cloud and to increase the agility in the application release cycle, organizations need a comprehensive cloud management solution. Rightscale, with their expertise in cloud management, is well positioned to offer this solution.

Only last week, Rightscale announced a new round of funding worth $ 25 Million. They are following up that announcement with the availability of new Righscale Development & Test Solution Pack. They have also partnered with IBM and Zend Technologies to offer a comprehensive application development support. Some of the interesting features of this Rightscale solution are

Support for four development languages, PHP, Java, Ruby and .NET
There are two different user interfaces in the core management platform, one for developers and one for IT admins
There are two pre-configured server environments available, an “All-in-One” configuration, which provides an easy way to do basic integration testing on a single server in the cloud; and a “Multi-Tier” environment, which can be used for more complex testing with separate load balancing, application and database servers
It also includes additional, feature-rich Java and PHP stacks developed by RightScale partners IBM and Zend Technologies, respectively. The IBM Java stack comprises the IBM DB2 database and the WebSphere application server, and it is available in a Community Edition as well as an Enterprise Edition. Zend delivers a tested stack that incorporates PHP, Zend Framework, required extensions and drivers, as well as an extensive set of application management capabilities that address a range of development needs on the cloud

The solution is available for an introductory price of $250 per month for the first year and, I guess, it will go up from there. This is a pretty comprehensive offering catering to a wide range of developers. Rightscale is doing all the right moves in the industry and I am still wondering who is going to grab them first.