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

Time Machine saves ten-fold or more on resources and costs associated with temporal testing of applications. It enables you to finish your large scale software projects on time and under budget. Some other usage scenarios of Time Machine include Cloud migration, time zone adjustment, data aging, Big Data analysis and online training. Time Machine is the original date and time simulation software for UNIX and Windows since 1997 and it is Cloud ready. Thousands of customers worldwide utilize Time Machine successfully across all industries on a daily basis; including 47 of the Fortune 100 companies.

About Solution-Soft

Solution-Soft is the leader in virtual clock, time shift testing software solutions for the ever changing digital world. Our flagship and market proven product, Time Machine, opened up brand new possibilities in the application testing landscape upon its release in 1997. Today, thousands of applications have been tested with Time Machine, and IT professionals recognize that using a virtual clock is the ideal and safest way to conduct date and time testing. As pioneer in our field, we've created the Time Machine Product Suite, a collection of cutting-edge testing software that augment Time Machine to further streamline enterprise cloud initiatives and IT simplification. The product suite offers a complete solution for end-to-end application testing, cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOPs, Continuous Operation, and Test Data Management. We proudly provide our 2000+ domestic and international customers, including 47 of Fortune 100 companies, our advanced solutions to optimize their testing and help deliver projects on-time. Solution-Soft's customers are across all market sectors including 3M, AMEX, Australia Tax Office, BBC, Boeing, British Gas, Covered California, Discover, Fed Ex, Federal Reserve Bank, French Telecom, National Australia Bank, and Zurich Insurance. We bolster our market presence through robust partnerships with companies including Accenture, Capgemini, Citrix, Delphix, DXC, FICO, HPE, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat and SAP.

Founded in 1993, Solution-Soft is privately held and based in Santa Clara, CA. for more information visit www.solution-soft.com or call +1.408.346.1400.

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