Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.
The adoption of DevOps has shortened and simplified the application development lifecycle. But with an increased focus on speed to market comes an even greater risk that the application will fall short against its objectives. This risk is further accentuated when the application relies — as most do these days — on distributed networks.
To mitigate this, DevOps teams need a means of verifying, at every stage of the development process, how the application performs in the real world network environment.
So what we need, to make sure it's all going to work properly when we put it "out there", is a network that behaves like the real network, but that you can control.
Why not just use the real network itself? Because it's like the weather, it can be fine, cloudy, rainy, stormy, and you simply have no control over it. It is what it is, as they say. And that's even assuming your organization is going to let you introduce an untested application into the real network!
What you want is a network that can be "stormy" when you want, so you can make sure your application works even when the environment is being difficult. What you need is a way of make sure (sometimes called testing!) your application works in the final network.
Now, the problem with most "test equipment" is that it normally lives in a lab. You have to "go there" to use it. That's not much use to developers, operations people, network specialists and more.
What you need is an "extension" of your current, probably benign, network that behaves like a potentially unfriendly real world one. That means you can sit where you are, develop, test, do trial deployments, whatever, accessing current or proposed infrastructure through a Virtual Test Network extension of your network.
Virtual Test Network (Network Emulator) can recreate, on demand, a wide range of adverse network conditions, often encountered in real world networks, in which to test application behaviors. The icing on the cake is that individual members of the DevOps team can control the characteristics of their own bit of the virtual test network without trampling on somebody else's settings.
And a Virtual Test Network is not just for special phases like final pre-deployment testing. It's for everyday and everyone who shares responsibility for designing, developing and deploying applications. So it really should be regarded as a "Must-Have" tool for the DevOps team.
Frank Puranik is Senior Technical Specialist at iTrinegy.
Industry News
Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.
Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.
Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.
DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.
Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.
Buildkite announced the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Packagecloud, a cloud-based software package management platform, in an all stock deal.
CrowdStrike has agreed to acquire Bionic, a provider of Application Security Posture Management (ASPM).
Perforce Software announces BlazeMeter's Test Data Pro, the latest addition to its continuous testing platform.
CloudBees announced a new cloud native DevSecOps platform that places platform engineers and developer experience front and center.
Akuity announced a new open source tool, Kargo, to implement change promotions across many application life cycle stages using GitOps principles.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. announced that it has been recognized on Newsweek’s inaugural list of the World’s Most Trustworthy Companies 2023.
CloudBees announced significant performance and scalability breakthroughs for Jenkins® with new updates to its CloudBees Continuous Integration (CI) software.