Ravello helps shift software development and testing to public cloud

VMworld Europe is just around the corner for the individuals lucky enough to travel to Barcelona this year. It’s only been a month since the world’s largest virtualization trade show concluded its business in San Francisco, and after speaking with dozens of vendors on the expo floor in the Moscone Center, there is still so much to cover and discuss from that show.

One company that caught my eye both before and during VMworld is a startup called Ravello Systems. This company launched out of the gate with a great pedigree and is manned by individuals who were responsible for building Qumranet, the company behind the KVM hypervisor. Ravello first unmasked itself in 2012, then later announced a $26 million funding round in February of this year. During that time, the company had been promoting its concept of a “cloud hypervisor” among select customers as part of an ongoing beta program. But that beta period has come and gone, and the company recently announced its product is now ready for prime time and general consumption.

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Ravello has created a Cloud Application Hypervisor that is built with a new high-performance nested hypervisor technology called HVX. With this technology, the company is taking the concept of virtualization in a new direction. Unlike VMware’s technology which was originally designed for on-premise static servers, Ravello is instead focusing its early efforts on testing enterprise applications in dynamic cloud environments.

The company’s stated goal has been to deliver an end-to-end system that makes development and test of existing on-premise applications “ridiculously easy.” Its mantra has been the same: Always test on replicas of production and never run out of capacity.

To make this possible, Ravello has abstracted away the differences in compute, networking, and storage across different clouds. It believes the auto-selection of clouds, the single account, and the single billing feature are an inherent part of making the user experience seamless.

How does it do this?

The company’s cloud application hypervisor encapsulates multi-VM applications along with its entire environment, including the VMs, networking, storage, and more, so that enterprises can run any application in any cloud without making any changes.

Remember, a typical hypervisor like VMware or KVM is designed to run on a physical server, but HVX is designed to run inside a virtual machine. Ravello analyzes the application and normalizes it so that it’s abstracted from the virtual machine it’s running on. By abstracting the application from the underlying VM that it’s running on, the application becomes more portable. At the end of the day, the application no longer knows or cares whether it’s running on VMware vSphere or on open source KVM.

“Our unique technology allows us to spin up exact replicas of complex existing VMware or KVM workloads, completely unmodified in any leading public cloud, Navin Thadani, senior VP of products at Ravello Systems, told InfoWorld. “We’ve established some great partnerships with public cloud providers, including AWS, HP Cloud, and Rackspace. By utilizing these cloud providers, we’re ultimately solving the capacity issue and are able to allow enterprise developers to do continuous testing without resource contention.”

Ravello solves a critical limitation for developers, so they can always develop and test on replicas of production and never run out of capacity.

The process of creating replicas of production environments for complex multi-VM applications can be extremely cumbersome, but Ravello helps automate the infrastructure so developers have self-service access to spin up these replicas with a single click.

“Testing usually comes with bursty workloads, and when that happens, the process is often hindered by capacity limitations that result in extensive waiting times in the queue,” Thadani said. “In these situations, it doesn’t make economic sense for enterprises to build internal datacenter capacity for peak usage, since on average, resource utilization may be as low as 1 percent.”

Thadani went on to say that “the public cloud is a promising solution — however, the environment is very different so it isn’t a helpful resource. This is where Ravello comes into play — allowing enterprises … to seamlessly use any leading cloud provider to develop and test their existing on-premise applications without having to make any changes to the existing VMs.”

Since the February launch of Ravello’s public beta, there have been more than 2,000 enterprise users that have replicated more than 30,000 applications into the public cloud. Ravello’s application deployment tool helped ScanCafe, a photo digitization service provider based in California, with its software development and testing processes. The company said it was essentially prioritizing agility and rolling out code as fast as it could — without having the infrastructure or automation needed in order to fully test its applications. With Ravello, the company said, it no longer needs to compromise and it is able to take applications to market much faster and with better quality.

A ScanCafe spokesperson said one of the main benefits from the product was better accountability within its development team because everyone was able to receive their own environment.

Ravello’s pricing is as interesting as its technology. Ravello offers an application-centric, usage-based pricing model, so rather than pay per VM, a customer ends up paying per application on a per-hour basis. Pricing does fluctuate and is based on three factors: the application’s size, complexity, and optimization criteria (either “cost optimized” or “performance optimized”).

According to Ravello, pricing starts as low as 14 cents per hour for 2vCPU and 4GB of RAM for application compute, a figure that includes the cost of the underlying public cloud used by Ravello’s software-as-a-service application. At first glance, this initial pricing looks fairly inexpensive, but as an environment grows in size, resource usage, and complexity, things won’t remain that cheap. It is important to keep an eye on the cost.

The company does provide an online pricing tool that should provide insight.

This article, “Ravello helps shift software development and testing to public cloud,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in virtualization and cloud computing at InfoWorld.com.