DevOps.com

  • Latest
    • Articles
    • Features
    • Most Read
    • News
    • News Releases
  • Topics
    • AI
    • Continuous Delivery
    • Continuous Testing
    • Cloud
    • Culture
    • DataOps
    • DevSecOps
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • Leadership Suite
    • DevOps Practice
    • ROELBOB
    • DevOps Toolbox
    • IT as Code
  • Videos/Podcasts
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
    • DevOps Unbound
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming
    • On-Demand Webinars
  • Library
  • Events
    • Upcoming Events
    • On-Demand Events
  • Sponsored Content
  • Related Sites
    • Techstrong Group
    • Container Journal
    • Security Boulevard
    • Techstrong Research
    • DevOps Chat
    • DevOps Dozen
    • DevOps TV
    • Techstrong TV
    • Techstrong.tv Podcast
    • Techstrong.tv - Twitch
  • Media Kit
  • About
  • Sponsor
  • AI
  • Cloud
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Continuous Testing
  • DataOps
  • DevSecOps
  • DevOps Onramp
  • Platform Engineering
  • Low-Code/No-Code
  • IT as Code
  • More
    • Application Performance Management/Monitoring
    • Culture
    • Enterprise DevOps
    • ROELBOB
Hot Topics
  • npm is Scam-Spam Cesspool ¦ Google in Microsoft Antitrust Thrust
  • 5 Key Performance Metrics to Track in 2023
  • Debunking Myths About Reliability
  • New Relic Bets on AI to Advance Observability
  • Vega Cloud Commits to Reducing Cloud Costs

Home » Features » Clone your entire IT infrastructure in the cloud at the push of a button

Clone your entire IT infrastructure in the cloud at the push of a button

Avatar photoBy: Tony Bradley on July 17, 2014 1 Comment

Rapid development and deployment is a hallmark of DevOps. The faster pace doesn’t change the need for testing applications before they’re pushed to production, or QA testing the code and infrastructure, though. The tricky part for many organizations is that different groups need access to the same environment, and creating duplicate environments can be tedious.

Recent Posts By Tony Bradley
  • The Best Approach to Help Developers Build Security into the Pipeline
  • Better Apps and Better Security When You Shift Left
  • The Road Ahead for Security, DevOps Transformation
Avatar photo More from Tony Bradley
Related Posts
  • Clone your entire IT infrastructure in the cloud at the push of a button
  • Equalizing IT infrastructure with DevOps
  • Defining the Dev and the Ops in Devops
    Related Categories
  • Features
    Related Topics
  • IT infrastructure
  • nested virtualization
  • ravello
Show more
Show less

There are plenty of tools out there that enable an IT admin to quickly create and provision virtual servers. The virtual servers can even be created from base images that include all of the necessary applications and configuration to match the servers in production. That part is fairly simple.

TechStrong Con 2023Sponsorships Available

Where it starts to become challenging is the rest of the infrastructure. The virtual servers might be identical to the production servers, but unless the switches, routers, connections to other servers and applications, IP addresses, and every other aspect of the production infrastructure match identically, the testing or development done in the secondary environment might not be completely valid.

In 2011, the core team that introduced the KVM hypervisor—now the standard virtualization technology in Linux—founded Ravello Systems to address and solve this challenge. The Ravello Systems team understood that it’s possible to migrate virtual servers to a new environment, but that doing so introduces other issues, and the resulting environment is not an exact duplicate of the original. They set out to find a way for an entire infrastructure to keep up with the pace of agile development.

Ravello provides organizations with a way to implement repeatable deployments—complete clones—of complex multi-tier production environments at the push of a button. It’s a concept they call nested virtualization. Ravello saves a blueprint of the environment, and enables IT admins to spin up instances of the complete IT infrastructure, including networking and storage configurations, with a single click or API call.

One organization that has adopted Ravello for managing rapid development is Deutsche Telekom. Deutsche Telekom (DT)—the fourth largest wireless service provider in the world—maintains a cloud telephony service that is a complex multi-tier application with multiple virtual machines, and network appliances from F5 Networks, Brocade, and Palo Alto Networks. DT uses Chef and Jenkins to automate many aspects of continuous integration and continuous development, but it needed a solution to keep up with capacity needs without the expense and effort involved in expanding the physical datacenter environment.

“Creating a copy of our production-like environment in Ravello was easy. We simply uploaded our base image, and virtual appliance form factors of our physical appliances, and then used the Chef bootstrapping support that Ravello offers to bootstrap into our existing Chef infrastructure,” said Ram Akuka, director of DevOps at Deutsche Telekom HBS in a statement. “What we are building is a truly large scale system with millions of concurrent users and transactions, so by continuously developing with Ravello we can easily scale to meet our customer’s critical business communication needs twenty-four by seven.”

The first wave of virtualization made server platforms hardware agnostic. A virtual machine of any server operating system could be deployed and run from virtually any x86 hardware through virtualization. Ravello takes that a step farther by taking the entire virtualized environment, and making it cloud agnostic. The Ravello virtualized infrastructure can be deployed on AWS, Azure, or any other cloud platform.

Ravello also keeps the pricing and invoicing for the service simple. Ravello charges customers on a per application basis rather than per VM. The Ravello pricing also includes the underlying cloud platform. You get one bill from Ravello, and you don’t need to pay the cloud provider separately.

If you’re struggling to scale the scope and capacity of your infrastructure to keep up with demand, or you’re having challenges with development or testing in environments that aren’t exact clones of the production environment, you should take a closer look at Ravello and see if it will help you resolve those issues.

Filed Under: Features Tagged With: IT infrastructure, nested virtualization, ravello

« ChatOps: Communicating at the speed of DevOps
The evolution of built-in DevOps features in cloud platforms »

Techstrong TV – Live

Click full-screen to enable volume control
Watch latest episodes and shows

Upcoming Webinars

https://webinars.devops.com/overcoming-business-challenges-with-automation-of-sap-processes
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 - 11:00 am EDT
Key Strategies for a Secure and Productive Hybrid Workforce
Tuesday, April 4, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT
Using Value Stream Automation Patterns and Analytics to Accelerate DevOps
Thursday, April 6, 2023 - 1:00 pm EDT

Sponsored Content

The Google Cloud DevOps Awards: Apply Now!

January 10, 2023 | Brenna Washington

Codenotary Extends Dynamic SBOM Reach to Serverless Computing Platforms

December 9, 2022 | Mike Vizard

Why a Low-Code Platform Should Have Pro-Code Capabilities

March 24, 2021 | Andrew Manby

AWS Well-Architected Framework Elevates Agility

December 17, 2020 | JT Giri

Practical Approaches to Long-Term Cloud-Native Security

December 5, 2019 | Chris Tozzi

Latest from DevOps.com

npm is Scam-Spam Cesspool ¦ Google in Microsoft Antitrust Thrust
March 31, 2023 | Richi Jennings
5 Key Performance Metrics to Track in 2023
March 31, 2023 | Sarah Guthals
Debunking Myths About Reliability
March 31, 2023 | Kit Merker
New Relic Bets on AI to Advance Observability
March 30, 2023 | Mike Vizard
Vega Cloud Commits to Reducing Cloud Costs
March 30, 2023 | Mike Vizard

TSTV Podcast

On-Demand Webinars

DevOps.com Webinar ReplaysDevOps.com Webinar Replays

GET THE TOP STORIES OF THE WEEK

Most Read on DevOps.com

Don’t Make Big Tech’s Mistakes: Build Leaner IT Teams Instead
March 27, 2023 | Olivier Maes
How to Supercharge Your Engineering Teams
March 27, 2023 | Sean Knapp
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities
March 27, 2023 | Mike Vizard
The Power of Observability: Performance and Reliability
March 29, 2023 | Javier Antich
How Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) Enhances Software Delivery
March 30, 2023 | Bill Doerrfeld
  • Home
  • About DevOps.com
  • Meet our Authors
  • Write for DevOps.com
  • Media Kit
  • Sponsor Info
  • Copyright
  • TOS
  • Privacy Policy

Powered by Techstrong Group, Inc.

© 2023 ·Techstrong Group, Inc.All rights reserved.