News

Qubell Launches Hadoop Development Test Service

• By David Ramel
• January 20, 2015

Autonomic applications specialist Qubell last week made a couple of Big Data waves with the introduction of a testing environment along with what it claims to be the "first autonomic application management platform for cloud applications."

Qubell for Hadoop Developers helps Hadoop developers add dynamic, on-demand, cloud-based test environments for new or ongoing Big Data analytics projects.

"Now instead of waiting for IT to find the right infrastructure, we're making it possible for Hadoop developers to add dynamic, cloud-based test environments on-demand for their Big Data analytics projects," said CEO Victoria Livschitz in a blog post. "And because they're already pre-packaged with all the necessary analytics tools, they have much less to learn and can get started right away."

The company's "starter kit" to begin working with Hadoop-based Big Data projects includes a Hadoop distribution from Cloudera Inc. and associated components such as Hive, Cloudera Manager, Impala, Pig, Flume and more, optimized to run on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud.

Qubell said its solution solves two major problems with Big Data project testing: lack of access to a suitable testing infrastructure and lack of skilled developers for configuring, testing and managing associated tools and environments.

"Because of the associated costs and time involved, testing Big Data applications is most commonly done in production by fencing off part of the production system for the developers, but this approach presents two problems for organizations," the company said in a statement. "First, changes made by developers can oftentimes wreak havoc to production systems and second, innovation is stifled when developers are severely restricted in what they can actually do in a fenced-off environment."

The pay-per-use solution runs on the company's autonomic application delivery and management platform, also announced last week. Along with facilitating self-service test environments, the platform reportedly provides continuous delivery and live updates and visibility into configuration changes.

Qubell said its platform helps developers create applications as adaptive, self-managed services that can make configuration changes, fix problems, optimize and protect themselves as changes occur in dynamic cloud environments. It consists of a self-service portal and a control fabric.

The self-service portal "enables developers to package applications as self-managed, adaptive entities and operations teams to define policies that govern how applications integrate and respond to changes in their environments," the company said. The control fabric "continuously monitors the stability of the applications, shapes their response to changes, and executes cascading change requests resulting from commands, events, triggers, failures or other changes in the environment."

Livschitz said enterprises of all sizes can get started quickly with a free self-sign up tier that can gradually transform into a paid plan as usage increases.