CA Technologies launched a new book called "Service Virtualization: Reality Is Overrated” at Oracle OpenWorld. Written for both executive and technical readers, the book explains the practice of Service Virtualization (SV) for simulating complex applications, and outlines lessons gleaned from applying this approach within customer IT environments.
Co-authored by CA CTO John Michelsen and CA LISA director of product marketing Jason English, both of whom were previously with ITKO, a provider of service simulation solutions for developing applications in composite and cloud environments which CA acquired over a year ago, the book explains how deploying service virtualization to simulate the behavior, responsiveness and data of dependent systems can help remove constraints in the existing software environment, and help increase the speed, performance, and agility for the development of enterprise application software.
“The future is heterogeneous - there is no way around that,” English told 5 Minute Briefing at OpenWorld. Simulating the constraints or dependencies in an organization’s software lifecycyle for development and testing, including anything that they may not have access to that might be too large and cumbersome to virtualize by any conventional means, service virtualization is able to fill the rest of those needs. “We are able to take some of the dependencies out.”
According to English, the main problem in software testing is that organizations don’t have a complete environment for testing software and as a result, may spend up to $10 million per lab instances trying to replicate things like their mainframe applications or back-end systems. These companies need to find a way to remove the costs and time constraints their current development processes entail, he notes.
The more different teams that use it within an organization, the more value it has, because it takes away delay, says English, who estimates that currently about 20% of the market that should know about service virtualization actually does.
In particular, the current enterprise focus on cloud deployments is a natural fit for service virtualization, he adds. “We think cloud is the first place you should use this. If you have virtualization alongside service virtualization, it is very elastic.”
The book is available on Amazon and in eBook format from CA Press.