IBM and CloudShare launch agile development platform

IBM and CloudShare recently announced their partnership to provide a pre-production, cloud-based agile development environment that you can setup in minutes. Ordinarily, it's an exaggeration to say, "Setup in minutes" but in the case of CloudShare's virtual machine template inventory, it's plain fact. Better yet, you can setup what they refer to as a small SharePoint Farm with a single click. No, it's not a joke. In fact, you can select from an array of pre-built environments and deploy any of them with a single click.

Cloud computing addresses one of the more frustrating aspects of traditional application development, according to Guri Stark, CEO of CloudShare. "Getting additional resources and new versions of servers and software is costly and takes a long time," he said. "In contrast, our cloud service can spin up new virtual machines in minutes."

Yes, you could use Amazon.com's AWS but you'd spend hours or days doing what you can do in less than ten minutes on CloudShare. Take it from someone who's tried to use both of them. If you gave me the task of setting up a SharePoint Farm (App Server, Web Server, Database Server, SharePoint Server) on Amazon.com and on CloudShare, I'd have your environment ready for use in ten minutes on CloudShare and perhaps in a week or more on Amazon.com.

If you think I'm kidding, try them both for yourself. IBM and CloudShare are offering you a free trial of the service.

And, when you're convinced, you'll love their pricing too, which, by my calculations are much better than Amazon's.

Cloud computing addresses one of the more frustrating aspects of traditional application development, according to Guri Stark, CEO of CloudShare. "Getting additional resources and new versions of servers and software is costly and takes a long time," he said. "In contrast, our cloud service can spin up new virtual machines in minutes."

But, the IBM and CloudShare partnership doesn't end with rapid deployment, easy-to-use service and great pricing, you don't have to worry about licensing for any of the operating systems or packaged software that you use.

Before you decide to push this one to the side as a "Standard Cloud Offering," read on.

You have the option of selecting from more than 60 virtual machine templates, including Windows XP, CentOS, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012. This means that you can go from legacy to the newest releases all in the same interface. Currently, they offer 23 SharePoint Templates in addition to the many combined (Complete Farm) offerings.

Additionally, IBM and CloudShare offer Rational Team Concert (RTC): a complete development environment for teams that combines agile methods, formal and hybrid planning and reporting on a single platform. CloudShare’s pre-configured RTC 4.0 environment provides virtual machines with RTC pre-installed, client machines with the Eclipse integrated development environment, an RTC plugin and code samples.  CloudShare said the package "allows developers to begin coding in minutes" and also easily launch new virtual machines for testing and evaluation.

Once you've registered and tried out CloudShare's service and their development platforms, talk back and tell me what you think of it.