DEVOPSdigest

Skytap announced an advanced new Vagrant Provider, offering software engineering teams the ability to instantly synchronize a local development stack with on-demand cloud-based environments.

The latest Vagrant capability is part of Skytap’s current initiative for supporting the application modernization tool chain, which includes open-source contributions, adapters for leading continuous delivery tools, and integrations with today’s most prevalent business platforms and legacy applications. Skytap customers gain access to modern tooling that enables them to automate builds, deployments, and handoffs wherever and whenever possible to increase development throughput and agility. This toolchain allows developers or testers to launch an entire reference stack for a given customer on day one, in ready cloud infrastructure, drastically increasing their productivity.

“In software delivery, the benefit of modern tooling is that we can automate builds, deployments and handoffs wherever and whenever possible to increase development throughput and agility,” said Michael Knowles, IT Director, Fulcrum Technologies. “When a developer or tester can launch an entire reference stack for a given customer on day one, in ready cloud infrastructure, their productivity increases.”

The advanced software-defined networking capabilities of Skytap, combined with Vagrant, support a secure synchronization workflow between a developer or quality engineer’s local stack, and its exact copy in a Skytap cloud-based environment. This streamlines the staging, testing, and synchronization of machines and software versions among teams, driving increases in overall software quality and dramatically reducing timelines.

“When current environments aren’t ready for developers, forcing them to spend time on installation and updates instead of collaboration, software delivery is inhibited,” said Sumit Mehrotra, Principal Product Manager, Skytap. “We are making a concerted push to support development teams by provisioning and launching Skytap environments on the fly, in the context of the tools they are currently using, so they can focus on delivering better software in production-equivalent cloud environments, rather than managing infrastructure.”

In addition to Vagrant, developers using Skytap have access to a full series of enhancements and integration kits that support the latest in-demand technologies within the application modernization tool chain, including the following:

- An Ansible Dynamic Library for coordinating configuration changes to hosts in Skytap environments

- Adapters for Puppet and Chef automation

- Access to leading tools for continuous delivery from IBM UrbanCode, CA Release Automation, and more

- Compatibility with microservices and containers including Kubernetes, Mesos, Docker and Docker Machine

- Contributions to Open Source developer community projects including OpenStack