If you don't scale, you'd better look out!

Hey guys,

A good friend of mine and former colleague at Microsoft, Ian Knox just launched a new service called SkyTap.

SkyTap combines lab automation and virtualization with an on-demand, through-the-browser delivery model.

What you get with SkyTap is the ability to pick and choose from a library of pre-built images. These images range from the basic OS (i.e. Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows, etc) to pre-configured technology stacks (i.e. MySql on CentOS, SQL Server on Windows, IIS on Windows, etc).

With literally a few clicks in your browser, you can assemble a set of machines and start them up; SkyTap manages all the hardware resources needed to run your configuration.

Load testing is a perfect usage scenario for this sort of service. You can pick out your deployment configuration - maybe a IIS on Windows and a MySql on CentOS for example and then throw together a few machines that will act as test clients. There are a number of load testing frameworks you can use - Selenium Remote Control is a great open source one; and Visual Studio Team System is a great commercial solution.

In any case, you can fire up the machines you need for your load test, get your results and then shut them down.

Because all of the machines are virtual, you can save their states; or quickly re-image them if you mess them up.

Anyways, congrats to the SkyTap team!

Thanks!

Eric.