I recently visited a customer and was surprised to learn just how sophisticated their IT operation is. They have a private cloud for Dev and Test and automated deployments (courtesy of AnthillPro) across all environments. The development and QA teams may request an environment for a specified period of time and then deploy their build to this environment for testing. This entire system, the environment provisioning and the application deployment is fully automated and turns what used to be a multi-week process into a one that literally takes minutes. BTW, these environments are non trivial as they are made up of multiple virtual machines along with network configuration, firewall rules, load balancing, edge caching, and more. Continue reading →