Let’s look at the world of mobile app development. On one end of the spectrum, there are brand new mobile applications or services, which are built from scratch and in almost all cases use one of our existing public user identities (google, Facebook, twitter etc.). Most of these applications are consumer oriented like gaming apps, location based search apps, collaboration/messaging and probably many more, that if I could speculate, I would be starting my own mobile app company.
Then, there are enterprises who are frantically trying to enable mobile access to their critical business applications for their employees, suppliers, partners and customers.
So, when I saw the announcement from AWS on their mobile solutions, I got really excited. Remember, AWS changed the way developers develop web applications and I thought that this could just be the start for a big change in mobile application development. AWS not only took out the obstacle of having physical or virtual infrastructure available for web application developers, but also provided them modules like ELB, RDS, Cloudwatch so they could focus on application development and bring their applications faster to market.
Now, with AWS Cognito, Analytics and SNS push modules, AWS is doing the same for mobile application developers. These new solutions are targeted at new mobile application development. If I want to develop a new mobile game, I can use the Cognito service to develop a simple backend infrastructure to manage my users, their data and states. Then, I can use the AWS Analytics module to monitor the usage stats and push new updates to my mobile game through AWS SNS push module. Voila, so now I have a full ecosystem of components available to me and as a developer, all I need to focus on is to develop the best game for my users and test it, so it can scale when it’s the No. 1 game on app stores.
But, wait…the world of mobile applications is not just games. There is huge revenue opportunity in enabling consumers, partners and suppliers to transact business through multiple channels - mobile devices, web and storefronts. Enterprises have pegged their futures to this idea. But, here’s where it gets interesting. Enterprise business systems which are used to conduct commerce have been in place for years. There is a networked system of applications in place to buy, pay, order, return, store and manufacture goods. So, any new mobile applications that enable you to do these actions from your mobile device have to integrate and interact with these enterprise business systems. Does AWS Cognito and other mobile solutions help with these?
The answer is a big NO. Why?
Because enterprise mobile application clients have to be developed and tested against business applications back ends. These are the same middleware and db tiers which are also used by web and storefront applications to transact business. So, now we have added a completely new release pipeline that is dependent on the same set of shared backend resources for development and testing. The outcome is a disgruntled developer who now has to wait for their turn to test new features and code fixes.
Now, let’s look at how developers who are working on enterprise mobile apps can develop and test in AWS. One method is to try and recreate the entire enterprise backend stack and client instances on AWS. The problem is that this is very time consuming and complex exercise and sometimes impossible. Also, its not possible to run mobile client instances for IOS and Android on AWS directly.
With Ravello Systems high performance nested hypervisor platform, you can accomplish this very easily.
Let’s look at How.
Step 1 – Clone your existing business application backend test stack on Ravello and run it on AWS. No need to make any changes to your VMs, networking and application.
Step 2 – Run your mobile test clients like Android on AWS through Ravello.
Step 3 – Run your mobile application client on Android instances running on AWS through Ravello.
Step 4 – Execute your functional tests on the Android client instances, which are talking to a completely isolated copy of your business application back end stack.
Step 5 – Execute scale tests by easily spinning out multiple Android client instances (no limits because you are running on public cloud!!).
Step 6 – Execute step 1- 5 in an automated manner by callouts to Ravello REST APIs from your CI systems like Jenkins, Ansible etc.
Don’t let the limited resource pool of test back end environments slow you down. In the world of mobile application development, only two things matter – Great user experience and speed to market.
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