Products: iTKO LISATM Virtualize
Eliminate the Costs and Limitations of Constrained Services and Data for Quality and Agility
iTKO's LISATM Virtualize offers unmatched value throughout the IT lifecycle, by capturing and modeling a Virtual Services Environment (VSE) within LISA, which acts as a robust behavioral simulation of a service and its underlying implementation layers. With VSE, multiple teams can design and test services in parallel, without the burden of dependency on constrained live service implementations and systems, or maintaining costly replicated test environments.
The Challenge
Distributed architectures such as SOA, Saas and Cloud Computing create profound value by allowing the business to "decouple" technologies from local control, allowing teams to produce smaller units of functionality in smaller, quickly achieved increments, which are tied together flexibly to meet business requirements. However, companies embarking on distributed computing approaches quickly realize the serious constraints of interdependency that can limit the agility we expect, while increasing costs.
Since services are late binding by nature - coming together in production to deliver their combined functionality, business teams often give up on build and test automation - and only "acceptance test" against the live applications on the occasions when they are available. Or they resort to the costly and time-consuming process of provisioning and maintaining their own complete staging environment - including licensed copies of all the mainframes, datasets, services and applications needed to validate the enterprise apps in absence of the live implementation. In this situation, simply virtualizing the hardware may save you the cost of another CPU, but it will not eliminate the high provisioning and maintenance costs, or the dependency upon live services.
How do you build and test your distributed apps, when your testing depends on so many of the other services and moving parts of a typical IT environment? You can create a "mock" stub of a service that simply returns some set values and allows the test case to continue on its way. But not only is that a coding effort that is even less efficient than coding a test harness for the real object, it is not dynamic enough to be a truly useful development artifact for validating meaningful behavior.
How LISA Virtual Service Environment Works.
Building your own functionality correctly can be hard to accomplish when live services, data and system assets are not available. In runtime, your access to live production systems may be limited or forbidden. But you still need to test how your systems will interact with those components as you build them.
LISA VSE can capture, then model the expected functionality of any Service within distributed applications, whether that is a web application UI, a Web Service (WSDL), an integration layer such as an ESB, or an implementation layer such as an EJB or database, and represent that as a Virtual Service, with a high level of dynamic input and output capabilities that simulate real-world behaviors.
Features of LISA Virtual Service Environment
- Service Virtualization: LISA provides three levels of Service Virtualization, increasing the team's ability to design, build and test in parallel, without the burden of dependency on live Services:
- Fake services: Set up LISA to provide dummy SOAP responses and messages to be used as a test placeholder.
- Mock Web Services: LISA creates a web service, and LISA then validates inbound SOAP requests and responds with specific SOAP response from a data source (JDBC or .XLS)
- LISA Virtual Services: LISA dynamically invokes and gathers service responses from a Web Service, ESB, database, or mainframe, capturing a robust behavioral model of the service's behavior, including the implementation and data layers underneath it, and creates a Virtual Service asset internal to LISA that allows relevant testing to continue in absence of the implementation.
- Support for Virtual Test Beds
- System replay of Web Services: Proxy-level recording of Web Services, and replay of server SOAP responses.
- Remote Service Suites create virtual test environments to simulate the effects of testing against 3rd party services that are deployed outside the local implementation. Remote Service suites provide virtualization of the supporting infrastructure, and provide read responses back to the tester.
- Automated virtual test environment staging at build time and change time
- Virtual Endpoint Testing & Lookup. VSE allows the tester to build web service test cases from UDDI (Type 2 and 3) registries such as CentraSite or HP Systinet. At test case run time, rather than rely on a hard-coded URL, LISA pulls the latest WSDL (t-model), using the Registry to dynamically obtain the most current or relevant version of the service endpoint.
Benefits of LISA VSE
We propose the concept of Virtualized Services as an enabler for shared collaboration and quality across business teams and partners.
- Eliminates reliance on deployed services. Virtual Service Environment allows companies to break their dependencies on testing and validating against live services and implementation layers. Virtualization is no longer simply a discipline regarding the replication of hardware. Huge cost and efficiency savings are available through the virtualization of software components across groups collaborating on service-oriented architectures.
- Provides concurrent team and partner development and testing. Parallel development and "anytime, anywhere" testing availability against intelligent Virtual Services in LISA unconstrains the team from access limitations, meaning IT projects get done faster, at lower cost, with better test coverage.
- Huge cost savings over replicating, licensing and supporting complete test environments and systems.
- Easier test data management thanks to LISA's ability to dynamically capture very relevant, current data sets from modeled services and underlying databases and systems of record.
- Keeps dependent build and test instances more current. Capture and creation of a LISA Virtual Service is a fast, automated process in LISA, making it much easier to refresh than a managed testing environment with many moving parts to maintain.
What is Service Virtualization?
Business professionals are already familiar with the concepts of Server Virtualization and Desktop Virtualization for creating immediate value in the enterprise, by eliminating the need of excess servers in the data center, and automating the configuration of new Virtual Machines with pre-installed operating systems and software. Service Virtualization is quite simply, the counterpart to the desktop and hardware virtualization for the extended business. Distributed development and QA teams can proceed on their own timelines in parallel, without the dependency constraints of live or unavailable systems.
Download the LISA Virtualize brochure >>
Read the iTKO Whitepaper on "Service Virtualization for Enterprise IT" >>
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