More Related Content Similar to Demystifying Middleware for DevOps (20) Demystifying Middleware for DevOps1. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
An ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) White Paper
Prepared for Nastel
September 2011
IT & DATA MANAGEMENT RESEARCH,
INDUSTRY ANALYSIS & CONSULTING
2. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
Table of Contents
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................................1
Better Middleware Testing Means Lower Production Support Costs........................................................2
Nastel AutoPilot and AutoPilot On-Demand.................................................................................................2
Key Benefits and Pricing......................................................................................................................................4
EMA Perspective...................................................................................................................................................5
©2011 Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved. | www.enterprisemanagement.com
3. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
Introduction
DevOps is a hot topic right now, and for good reason. Today’s
application environments have become far too complex to deploy Tools play a key role in
and manage with silo teams and stand-alone tools. Instead, they DevOps, as the right tools
require coordination and collaboration across virtually all silos, can be a bridge supplying a
and this is typically accomplished with teams of senior specialists “common language” across
with skill sets spanning Development and Operations. Tools play teams with diverse skillsets
a key role in DevOps, as the right tools can be a bridge supplying and “technology languages.”
a “common language” across teams with diverse skillsets and
“technology languages.”
ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES® (EMA™) research has found that more than 80%
of today’s IT organizations rely on cross-functional teams to address application-related issues. These
teams are called by a variety of names. Few companies actually call them “DevOps,” but instead
know them as “Infrastructure Services” or “Centers of Excellence,” for example. In some companies,
these teams are composed of ad-hoc specialists drawn from Development and Operations. Other
companies fund dedicated groups through CIO or Operations budgets. Regardless of what they are
called or how they are organized, their roles are similar. They are responsible for planning, deploying
and supporting valuable business applications as they traverse the software lifecycle from development
through deployment and on to production.
One factor that is often overlooked in DevOps discussions is the fact that people and skills aren’t
enough. In today’s fast-paced technology environments, processes and tools are equally important. The
right tools enable specialists from a variety of technical backgrounds to find common ground by giving
them a common view of the application they are supporting.
Too often, these teams rely on homegrown tools that in virtually
every case are far less sophisticated than those available from
Too often, these teams rely today’s leading enterprise management vendors, and more difficult
on homegrown tools that in to maintain. Even those companies that do have commercial
virtually every case are far management solutions in place may limit access to production
less sophisticated than those support administrators. This is particularly true of management tools
available from today’s leading for middleware solutions such as IBM WebSphere MQ (WMQ).
enterprise management vendors, Nastel’s premium AutoPilot® M6 APM solution is used by the
and more difficult to maintain. world’s largest companies to strategically manage the performance
of mission-critical, tiered, integrated applications. On October 1,
2011, Nastel is releasing its first “freemium” solution, AutoPilot®
On-Demand for WebSphere MQ. This is a production-grade tool that is available free of charge for
use by Development, Operations, or DevOps to test WMQ-based applications.
This is the first in a series of “freemium” toolsets, with solutions for log analysis, Java, .NET, and other
technologies on the drawing board. This EMA paper describes the new product and its value proposition
and positions it in an industry in which middleware management tends to be an afterthought.
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4. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
Better Middleware Testing Means Lower Production
Support Costs
WMQ is today’s most widely used messaging system, supporting many of the most business-critical
applications on the planet. EMA has documented losses in the millions of dollars per year in downtime
at a high-tech manufacturer running WMQ-based applications. This company’s IT teams supported
350 + such applications, and the downtime was due to failures which were not detected by the ten-year-
old homegrown scripts used to manage them.1
Even for those companies that do invest in commercial tools, access to the toolsets is typically limited to
WMQ administrators and their delegates. This creates a significant problem for developers and Quality
Assurance (QA) professionals. Without self-service access to WMQ monitoring products, testing
software or duplicating production problems requires ongoing assistance from production WMQ
management teams. This can significantly impede timely software delivery and problem resolution.
Today’s highest-impact applications are, more often than not, integrated across tiers, companies, and
even geographies. These applications are extremely complex, and middleware is the “glue” that knits
them together.
While everyone understands that pre-production testing is necessary, duplication of these complex
production environments is virtually impossible. Reproducing production hardware, software, and
licensing for pre-deployment testing, and staffing to support it, is cost prohibitive in and of itself.
For this reason, application testing is all too often done against “stub” programs which simulate, but
cannot duplicate, production systems.
Since many complex applications go into production without being adequately tested, problems then
manifest in production environments. This creates additional problems for DevOps personnel, who
lack the tools necessary to identify and reproduce the problem. Recurring problems result, and such
problems can significantly impact ongoing production support costs.
A landmark U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) study on software testing found
that the cost of fixing software defects rises exponentially as the Software Development Lifecycle
(SDLC) progresses. While a defect discovered in the design phase may cost “X” to fix, the same defect
found during testing will cost between 5X and 10X. Once the software is in production, the cost
escalates to 30X.2 There are multiple reasons why this is true; however, the key takeaway is that lack of
software testing drives exponential ongoing costs.
Nastel AutoPilot and AutoPilot On-Demand
Nastel is targeting these WMQ-related challenges with its new “freemium” product. AutoPilot®
On-Demand for WebSphere WMQ is a Web-based, agentless version of Nastel’s enterprise-grade
AutoPilot for WebSphere WMQ solution. It is packaged for easy download and deployment as a
VMware Virtual Machine (VM) appliance.
1
D
ue to these losses, this company became a Nastel customer. The story is profiled in EMA
research entitled, The Search for the Elusive ROI: Tracking Down Value in a Jungle of Enterprise
Management Products, available at: http://www.enterprisemanagement.com/research/asset.php/1560/
The-Search-for-the-Elusive-ROI:-Tracking-Down-Value-in-a-Jungle-of-Enterprise-Management-Products
2
“
The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing”, available at: http://www.nist.gov/director/
planning/upload/report02-3.pdf
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5. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
Capabilities include:
• Secure, audited access controlled by personnel with administrative rights to each queue
• Views of WebSphere MQ resources such as queues, channels, queue managers, and subscriptions
(see Figure 1)
Figure 1: Channel View
• Ability to view and manipulate messages generated by applications (see Figure 2)
Figure 2: Message Management View
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6. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
• Views of queue status and applications (see Figure 3)
Figure 3: Queue Status View
• Resource utilization displays, such as queue depth, channel usage
• Ability to act on application specific messages (move, copy, edit, route, replay, create).
Available at: http://www.nastel.com/download-software_335_250.html, the tool can be downloaded,
deployed, and operational within 30 minutes. Once installed, it provides secure visibility to WMQ
queues via a standard Web link.
This visibility eliminates delays in developer, QA, or DevOps activities by putting self-service access
into their hands. This, in turn, reduces demands on middleware administrators, who are otherwise
called upon to drop their own work to assist these groups during testing.
Key Benefits and Pricing
• Simplicity: AutoPilot On-Demand is easy to deploy and simple to use. Delivered as a virtual appliance
image based on VMware, it can be deployed via VMware ESX or with the VMware Player available
at: http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/desktop_downloads/vmware_player/3_0. Users
simply download, unZip, and “play” the file, then add queue managers to be managed. No agents
are required.
• Secure multi-user access: Role-based access to messages and to the actions that can be applied to
these messages is provided. This provides self-service to each user but only to what they are
entitled to access.
• Vendor-provided online help and self-training: Developers and QA testers are not trained in IT operations.
Nastel has provided intuitive materials that guide key stakeholders based on WMQ concepts
familiar to them. The product requires minimal configuration, and is designed to be a “point and
shoot” solution.
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7. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
• Secure message management: Development and QA testing require repetitive iterations to “get the
software right” by testing a variety of use cases. A key differentiator is the inherent capability of
AutoPilot On-Demand to generate, browse, replay and reroute messages for ongoing iterations.
This can be a significant time saver for teams engaged in pre-deployment testing, as it eliminates
the need to re-create the data for each and every iteration.
• Better integration testing means better software quality: Ease of use and rich functionality enable higher
quality integration testing. Development, testing, and other groups can test against real WMQ
data to understand exactly how the software performs in real WMQ environments. This, in turn,
promotes bottom-line value based on better uptime, performance, and cost avoidance.
• DevOps enablement: Because of the cross-functional nature of DevOps teams, many companies
are struggling to figure out the right way to staff and support such teams. These teams have
different skills and “speak” different technology languages. The most positive outcomes require a
combination of people, process, and technology, and tools selections should reflect the requirement
to promote a common language based on everyone working from the same information base.
AutoPilot On-Demand for WMQ is an ideal tool for such teams, as it gives them the ability to
work collaboratively to identify and solve application-related problems, ideally before applications
are ever deployed.
• Easy “try before you buy” model: Zero cost for up to three users.
• Production pricing:
◦◦ Per defined-user licensing
◦◦ $20,000 core license for VM appliance with 10 users
◦◦ $2,000 per defined user
EMA Perspective
The DevOps concept is not new; however, it has become a hot topic in the past eighteen months to
two years as companies struggle to find a better way to support applications running over massively
distributed, diverse, and rapidly changing operational fabrics. DevOps is part of the answer, but people
and skills alone are no longer enough.
Modern enterprise management toolsets deliver value beyond simple automation. They encapsulate the
knowledge of some of the world’s best enterprise management experts, and customers are investing
in this knowledge as much as they are in the tools themselves. In the specific case of WMQ, it is a
complex technology for which neither Developers nor QA teams typically have administrative-level
expertise; however, they do know how applications interact with
WMQ and they need an easy way to see these interactions without
investing in expensive, heavyweight, administrative-level tools. “Try before you buy” is
Nastel’s development of this “freemium” product is notable in a something that most of
number of ways. “Try before you buy” is something that most of today’s companies are
today’s companies are seeking, and Nastel has gone to great lengths seeking, and Nastel has gone
to make access and implementation seamless and simple. It is also to great lengths to make
notable in that the product puts high-quality tools in the hands of access and implementation
pre-deployment, versus production, personnel, a constituency that seamless and simple.
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8. Demystifying Middleware for DevOps
has traditionally been underserved. Nastel has also made moving beyond the free version to a ten-
user license simple. Paid licenses are extremely reasonably priced, particularly in view of the value
proposition. Finally, AutoPilot® On-Demand for WebSphere WMQ fills a gap that other leading
vendors have not addressed.
While it’s hard to improve on “free,” Nastel AutoPilot covers a broad range of technologies supporting
the application fabric. It would be nice to see additional “freeware” tools in the future supporting Java
and .NET, for example, and apparently these are on the drawing board.
EMA expects that this initial foray into freeware will prove to be very popular. Considering the value
proposition of software testing, it is also likely that many of these initial deployments will turn into
paid licenses over time.
About Enterprise Management Associates, Inc.
Founded in 1996, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) is a leading industry analyst firm that provides deep insight across the full spectrum
of IT and data management technologies. EMA analysts leverage a unique combination of practical experience, insight into industry best practices,
and in-depth knowledge of current and planned vendor solutions to help its clients achieve their goals. Learn more about EMA research,
analysis, and consulting services for enterprise line of business users, IT professionals and IT vendors at www.enterprisemanagement.com or
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