Service virtualisation arrives in SA

In today's enterprise, software innovation is a large part of what drives business success. IT organisations have changed their approach to enterprise applications - from large and monolithic implementations, to ones that are more dynamic, distributed, and heterogeneous in nature.

This shift towards composite applications and other distributed application techniques including service oriented architecture, business process management, cloud-based and SaaS applications, along with the popularity of agile development techniques, has had the unintended consequence of increasing application cost and risk due to increasing complexity and frequent change - service virtualisation was developed to overcome the constraints of developing applications in these environments.

The concept of service virtualisation first emerged in early 2000 and was restricted primarily to the US. However, it has finally arrived in SA and this will add a new and critical dimension to modern IT management and extend it to encompass the entire service delivery lifecycle. In particular, it will help customers overcome the limitations of current organisational approaches, breaking down the silos across development, testing and operations.

This will benefit application development in SA as the business demand for rapid time-to-market and lower operational costs is driving IT organisations to quickly adopt new approaches such as composite application architectures and cloud services. As the quest for quickly delivering high-quality business services continues, IT management - from automation and security to governance and service assurance - becomes the most critical factor for success.

Service virtualisation is pioneering service simulation technology and has disrupted the traditional application development market. It also has rendered conventional application lifecycle management (ALM) methods and technology obsolete for organisations developing complex composite applications, employing agile development, and leveraging cloud services and components.

Service virtualisation customers are able to accelerate application delivery cycle times, improve the quality of services, and save millions in laboratory infrastructure and testing costs.

It is a mechanism that allows developers to capture and simulate the behaviour, data and performance characteristics of complete composite application environments in a manner which allows them to react and respond realistically for development and test teams throughout the software lifecycle, just as they would experience in a real production environment.

In other words, service virtualisation is the practice of capturing and simulating the behavior, data and performance characteristics of unavailable or incomplete systems for unconstrained use in development and testing lifecycles.

Service virtualisation, as a solution, enables organisations to “mock up” a service at enterprise speed and enterprise scale - even if the application is: unfinished; unstable; or the physical resource is unavailable. It virtualises an environment by simulating the behaviour of external services without actually invoking them - for example, how a checkout or fulfilment process should interact with a service, without actually authorising a credit card or putting a box on a truck.

The “What-if” capabilities offer a whole new way to understand how an application might behave if components are changed, for example, swapping an internal RDBMS for a cloud-based database or changing package shippers.

It automates the creation of complete software-based Virtual Service Environments (VSEs) that simulate observed behaviours, stateful transactions and performance scenarios, not just piecemeal responders or stubs. These VSEs are available 24/7, on demand, and require minimal setup time and overhead. The virtual services provide a solution for IT assets - such as mainframes - that have proven resistant to hardware virtualisation approaches.

Service virtualisation can be leveraged when live systems are not available due to project scheduling or security concerns. In cases where components have not been built yet, virtual environments can rapidly model and simulate the components from definitions for testing purposes. VSEs can be rapidly created and customised, and deployed on-premise or in Private and Public cloud-based labs, enabling faster parallel development across interdependent teams.

Service virtualisation addresses and overcomes most of the common application development challenges, such as:
Unavailable or inaccessible IT components and systems;
Dependent components or systems which have not yet been built;
Significant costs to setup development labs and test harnesses, including hardware, software licences and configuration costs;
Costly usage fees to access live third-party systems for non-production uses;
Poor software quality and performance problems appearing in production, when they are the costliest to repair;
Delays due to unavailable components and deliverables from other development teams; and
Extensive test data scenario management time and costs to setup and tear down data.

Faster Time-to-Market: By eliminating constraints on every phase of the SDLC, service virtualisation can accelerate delivery time for software projects often by as much as 40%.
Lower Infrastructure Costs: Avoid and eliminate costs for lab infrastructure, test harnesses, responders and mock-ups, including hardware, software licenses, service access fees, and configuration costs.
Enable Parallel Development: Allow teams to “decouple” from the complex application architecture to work in parallel, without conflicts over labs and data.
Shift Quality Left: All of these capabilities allow users to ensure quality at a component level, much earlier in the SDLC, so that far fewer defects and performance issues escape into QA and production environments, where they are the costliest to repair.

In my next article, I will focus on the benefits service virtualisation can bring to the South African business landscape.