IncrediBuild Uses Process Virtualization to Accelerate Application Development

Enterprise IT organizations have made massive investments in development tools, and yet the perception is that many of these tools were not really designed to support new agile development methodologies and continuous integration requirements.

Looking to fill that gap, IncrediBuild has developed a set of tools that makes it much faster to compile files when building applications. That’s a critical capability, says IncrediBuild CEO Eyal Maor, because organizations are under a lot of pressure to consider using other development platforms in order to become more agile.

Now there is both a new beta version of IncrediBuild that adds support for building native Linux and Android applications and a version that supports the NVIDIA Nsight Tegra, Visual Studio Edition for Android. In both cases, IncrediBuild is extending its reach beyond using Microsoft Visual Studio to only build Windows applications.

Maor says by injecting a small amount of agent software, IT organizations can dramatically accelerate the processes they use to develop applications without having to necessarily retrain the entire IT team to use new tools and processes to become agile. That IncrediBuild agent software makes use of process virtualization technology to build server machines specifically designed to accelerate code compilation, testing, packaging, rendering, code conversion and other compute-intensive development processes, says Maor.

Inspired by the way the Search for Extraterrestrial Life (SETI) project makes use of distributed compute resources, Maor says IncrediBuild uses process virtualization just like the SETI project does to distribute tasks across unused or underused processing resources that can be located anywhere across an extended network, including private and public cloud computing environments. That approach, says Maor, allows the IT operations team to define how much compute resources to allocate to any given developer without having to constantly provision and de-provision virtual machines.

Developers are under a lot of pressure to develop applications faster than ever. But as those applications increase in size, the development process becomes less agile. In fact, the level of agile development that can be achieved is always going to be limited by the speed at which the IT operations team can provision compute resources.

Short of giving each developer their own supercomputer, IT organizations clearly need to find another way to more easily make massive amounts of distributed compute resources available that, just like developers themselves, can now be found almost anywhere around the globe.