Time Machine® Floating License Advancement to Serve the Dynamic On-the-fly Nature and Needs of the Cloud

Submitted by Kathy on Fri, 2021-05-07 00:41

SANTA CLARA, CA. Wednesday, May 5, 2021, at 12:00 PM EDT

Topic

Time Machine® Floating License Advancement to Serve the Dynamic On-the-fly Nature and Needs of the Cloud

Dynamic Cloud Environment:

With the advent of Cloud and Agile paradigm shift, system footprint has become more and more dynamic. Systems can be spun down over nights or weekends to save costs. The test environments once configured can easily be saved as images and instantiated multiple instances quickly as needed for concurrent testing.

If the software life cycle calls for just 5 environments, 5 environments can be spun up. If it calls for 100 environments, then 100 environments can be spun up. This way 100% utility ratio can be maintained and a "pay as you go" model utilized. The same usage case is very difficult and wasteful on premises. If there are 20 fixed environments available, the other 15 will be idle when only 5 are in use. On the other hand, if more than 20 are needed; it will take a long time to procure and setup additional environments, which impacts productivity.

Dynamic Agile Environment:

Agile also speeds up this trend. With Agile, new releases can come out on a weekly basis. It is quite common to have multiple releases being tested at the same time. This is especially true with the concept of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery.

When source code is checked-in into source code control, system would automatically generate a new release. A test environment would be instantiated automatically to load the new release and run the regression test. Once completed, the environment would be destroyed immediately to save cost.

The Right Way to Go - Test Bed in the Cloud:

We encourage customers to move their test bed - test environments into the Cloud and use the “pay as you go” model. This way, customers can save costs by always maintaining 100% utilization rate, with the exact amount of environments needed at any given time. We also encourage customers to save their test environments golden copy into images.

This way, multiple test environments could be instantiated and spun up quickly and will ensure the data has the same starting point to start the regression test. This ability to increase test environments dynamically and quickly increases flexibility and productivity in addition to saving costs.

Challenge:

This dynamic, on-the-fly nature of the Cloud and Agile really challenges the traditional software licensing scheme. Obviously the licenses need to be floatable to different systems as time goes by and ideally it should be automatic with no human intervention needed to provide a new license key for the new box.

If customers need to call or email tech support to get a new license key for a new box, then test automation would be broken.

Solution:

Floating licenses also help to save costs. For example, let’s assume there are 100 systems that all need to have certain software running some of the time, but not all of the time.

In fact, only 40 systems, at most, would be needed to have this software running at any given time. In this case, rather than getting 100 node-lock licenses, 40 floating license will do. This could also be a cross time zone situation.

For example, there could be developer and tester teams in USA, Europe and Asia. Rather than each site in the continent getting their own licenses, floating licensing allows licenses not in use after work hours in USA to flow to Europe and Asia when they come in for work.

Real-life Example - Time Machine Floating License Server:

Solution-Soft developed Time Machine Floating License Server (TMFLS) to address these exact challenges and needs. TMFLS holds a pool of license units that could be utilized across OS platforms on premise or in the Cloud.

When Time Machine service starts, it would automatically check-out license units from the TMFLS license pool and it would release the license unit back to the pool when service stops.

Time Machine sends out hourly heart beat messages to TMFLS to inform that it is still alive and handling license unit adjustments on-the-fly due to CPU elasticity dynamically.

There is also a management function and GUI available for ease of management to check the pool size, current license units allocated and available license units’ count, all current license holders’ info, including their IP address, host name, OS type, license unit count, timestamp to start holding the license, and timestamp of the last heart beat check.

Conclusion:

The end result is that license and asset management becomes automatic and there is no need to contact technical support to manually get license keys for new systems or re-hosting any more. It also saves costs to enable customers to share the licenses on premises, across data centers, or in the Cloud and cross OS platforms.

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About Time Machine:

Software Virtual Clocks for Time Travel Testing. Simulate past and future dates effortlessly with Time Machine®, enabling comprehensive testing of your date- and time-sensitive applications. Ideal for validating critical business processes like quarter-end and year-end processing, billing cycles, regulatory compliance (including Year 2038), and policy lifecycles during integration, upgrades, virtualization, cloud migration, and containerization. Eliminate the risks and downtime associated with system clock resets in complex environments like Active Directory and Kerberos.

About Solution-Soft:

The Leader in Virtual Clock and Time Travel Testing Solutions

Since 1997, Solution-Soft has been at the forefront of virtual clock software and time travel testing solutions, empowering organizations in the ever-evolving digital world. Our flagship product, Time Machine, has revolutionized application testing, enabling thousands of companies, including 47 of the Fortune 100 US companies, to reduce costs and accelerate project delivery by an average of 3 – 10 times across traditional systems and containerized applications.

The Time Machine Product Suite extends these capabilities, optimizing cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOps, and containerization testing. Our latest innovation, Time Machine for Containers, supports standalone Docker containers and large-scale Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters (including a 16,000+ CPU core, 1,300+ namespace deployments).

Trusted by over 2,000 customers worldwide across diverse industries (including 3M, AMEX, BBC, Boeing, and more) and partnered with industry leaders like Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, Solution-Soft, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, provides cutting-edge solutions for your time-sensitive testing needs. Learn more at www.solution-soft.com or call +1.408.346.1400.

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