IBM-CloudShare Partnership Simplifies Agile Development in the Cloud

To ease the lives of application developers, IBM (News - Alert) and CloudShare recently teamed up to offer a cloud-based agile development platform, designed to allow developers to focus on creating technology, and give managers full visibility and change control.

IBM’s new Rational Team Concert (RTC) Application Life-cycle Management Suite “makes it easier than ever for developers to experience RTC 4.0 and begin working in the cloud,” according to Chris Riley, product manager and evangelist at CloudShare (News - Alert).

“CloudShare’s pre-configured RTC 4.0 Environment contains virtual machines with RTC pre-installed, client machines with Eclipse IDE and RTC Plugin, and code samples,” Riley explained in a recent blog post. “This allows developers to begin coding in minutes and, just as easily, get machines up and running for evaluation.”

The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and system administrator Ken Hess put IBM and CloudShare’s new agile development platform to the test.

“Ordinarily, it’s an exaggeration to say, ‘Setup in minutes’ but in the case of CloudShare’s virtual machine template inventory, it’s plain fact. Better yet, you can setup what they refer to as a small SharePoint Farm with a single click. No, it’s not a joke. In fact, you can select from an array of pre-built environments and deploy any of them with a single click,” Hess said.

For developers still not convinced they should give it a try, in addition to the rapid deployment, easy-to-use service and great pricing benefits, developers don’t have to worry about licensing for any of the operating systems or packaged software they use either. But wait; there’s more.

“You have the option of selecting from more than 60 virtual machine templates, including Windows XP, CentOS, Ubuntu (News - Alert), Xubuntu, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012,” Hess explained. “This means that you can go from legacy to the newest releases all in the same interface. Currently, they offer 23 SharePoint Templates in addition to the many combined (Complete Farm) offerings.”

For developers looking to eliminate physical boxes and hypervisors, by moving day-to-day work to the cloud, developers can reap the rewards of “change control, full sandboxing and collaboration that on-premise development cannot provide,” Riley said.

If you’re not entirely convinced you should give CloudShare a try, consider that their pricing is even better than Amazon, Hess said. Better yet, IBM and CloudShare are offering a free trial of the service.