Announced today at HP’s Discover conference, cloud provider Skytap has partnered with HP to deliver better automated testing in the cloud. Creating hooks into HP’s Application Lifecycle Management products, this means that developers are able to use the cloud for building all sorts of complex testing environments.
Testing in the cloud is a big time-saver: you don’t have to reimage machines or setup new instances of Windows and Linux servers from scratch, but can make use of pre-existing VM collections that can be modified to work with the HP test tools. You can grab an environment that has the right collection of machines and stitch them together to form your test environment in a matter of minutes.
Functions possible as part of this integration include the ability to do functional and performance testing – even simultaneously using two different collections of VMs. You can also use HP’s QuickTest Professional to perform automated regression testing on cloud VM collections, just as if these machines were sitting in your own data center.
Skytap makes it easy to setup VPN connections between your data center and their cloud and extend the HP testing tools across this hybrid environment. There is no additional charge for this service: pricing starts at $250 per month for up to five users and five VMs which includes 200 GB of overall storage.
