Using SQL Azure for SOA Quality Testing

SQL Azure provides affordable and rapid collaboration across SOA Test teams using SOAPSonar, the industry leading, comprehensive SOA and Cloud Testing product. This article provides an overview of using a shared repository: SQL Azure for collaborative SOA testing across dispersed SOA Test teams.

SQL Azure is a promising option for corporations that deploy Micrsoft technology and are interested in leveraging cloud computing to reduce IT costs and respond rapidly to business requirements. For companies that are simply looking for hosted relational databases, other options such as MySQL hosted by Amazon EC2, Rackspace, GoGrid or OpSource serve as strong alternatives.

Our impressions of SQL Azure have been positive. Through firewall rules, security provisions are adequete and not overwhelming for database and application developers. We do expect a richer web-based management interface in the future that goes beyond just creating an dropping databases. Although SQL Management Studio, installed locally on your machine, provides powerful management capabilities, it dilutes the power of installation-free, cloud-based components.

Corporations can use Quality Assurance and Testing as low-hanging use-cases for cloud computing. Companies should be less concerned about storing test data in external clouds compared to, for example, real customer data. Using SQL Azure for SOA test automation provides better collaboration for test teams, ease of database management and a cheaper alternative to procuring and maintaining on-premise test infrastructure.

For complete article, see:  http://soa.sys-con.com/node/1379631 

Network World: 15 Cloud Companies to Watch - Crosscheck Makes the List

Innovative vendors offering ways to make the transition to a cloud-based world less daunting.

Here are excerpts from the article published by Beth Schultz of Network World:

Why we're watching the company: Service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing companies have begun rounding out their product lines with tools aimed at giving IT organizations more confidence as they plan for application migrations to the cloud. The product can also ease the infrastructure and cost burdens of building out lab environments.

With CloudPort, developers can profile and measure the impacts of moving to cloud platforms while modeling the risk and cost benefits, the company says. From a central console, the tool provides information about cloud providers such as performance metrics, geographic latency and service initiation times; outages and application error states; and security, capacity and interoperability. Plus, it offers the ability to run what-if modeling scenarios. It leverages cloud instances from Amazon EC2, OpSource Cloud, GoGrid and Rackspace, and says its pay-as-you-go model lets enterprises realize cost savings of up to 60% when compared to reference architectures, while compressing the services life cycle and reducing time-to-market.

Who heads the company: CEO Mamoon Yunus, who founded Forum Systems, where he pioneered Web services security gateways and firewalls.

How the company got into cloud computing: Crosscheck comes from the Web services/SOA testing world. As SOA and virtualization come together in the cloud, adding cloud testing tools to its portfolio was a logical next step.

For complete article, see:
http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2010/ndc3/051010-ndc-cloud-companies.html?page=3