Background of the Field
Here at AFour Technologies, we have served numerous customers from new data center engineering domain.
Have developed solutions which provide visualization and monitoring for the data centers.
We have expertise in working with new data center engineering, it comprises of physical servers, virtualized and cloud-based environments.
Problems Solved for our Customers
Most of our customers’ business problems revolve around testing and QA services.
We provide end-to-end test consulting services including test strategy, designing, planning, estimation, execution, automation, and setting up of end-to-end testing lifecycle models for the customers.
Challenges faced by one of our customers: Customer was working on a new visualization and monitoring tool for new data center engineering. The key areas were to discover multiple appliances including physical, virtual and cloud-based infrastructure.
They used different protocols to discover these appliances. But on the whole, lacked a comprehensive testing solution for providing a bundled solution as a feature in their product.
For providing them with a solution, we started with a comprehensive analysis from testing prescriptive.
Test strategy was sketched, including functional as well as non-functional areas for their product.
The functional areas covered all the aspects of their product features, functionalities and non-functional areas covered performance, security, reliability and scalability aspects of their product.
We developed a test strategy consisting of 1000+ test cases with an automation-based approach; new feature was automated first, followed by execution through automation.
100% regression through automation was achieved according to the test strategy.
New features and functionalities were covered manually and then converted into automation.
With this approach test automation cycle was reduced significantly, while ensuring timely delivery for all the release test cycles.
Services we Provide
At AFour, we provide 360-degree product engineering services that include development services, DevOps, QA, Testing, Consulting and Support Services.
New Data Center Engineering at AFour: We typically focus on areas like storage, network virtualization and cloud.
According to the storage-based requirements for datacenter-based products, we come up with storage specific test design and test strategies.
For deployment, configuration and upgradation of platform-based services, we used different virtualization platforms like VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and cloud-based services like OpenStack, AWS and Azure.
Strategically, we created test beds according to the customer requirements, covering physical, virtual and cloud, for test and automation purpose. Then manual and automation tests are run on multiple test beds.
We also manage infrastructure for customers rendering with different cloud service providers. A very niche area we work on is: To provide testing and automation services based on back-up and disaster recovery solutions.
Team Composition
Small Team: [2-3 Members] Consisting of a senior or a mid-level automation engineer, a test-development engineer, and a test lead who would provide comprehensive test planning and strategy services to the customer.
Large Team: [8-10 Members] Consisting of a principal test engineer, a test architect overseeing the end-to-end test lifecycle management, and a combination of senior and junior test engineers highly specialized in automation using different open source technologies as well as scripting languages, and comprehensive test execution services.
New Data Center Engineering : Tools & Technologies
At AFour, we have developed state of the art inhouse test automation frameworks and accelerators.
Test accelerator like Vanilla with inbuilt libraries is used for accelerating test automation and development.
We use UNIX based test framework called Booster. It is a multi-threading, multi-tenancy parallel test automation-based framework which allows users to automate test cases on the fly.
Another framework is a headless browser test automation tool called Bolt. It doesn’t require a browser for running a test; the API based Bolt framework runs tests on headless browsers.
Other than these technologies, we have very comprehensive knowledge of different testing aspects in functional as well as non-functional areas: performance security and reliability.
We are an expert at running regression tests through automation as well as functional tests. These cover high availability clustering solutions for different technologies, including virtualization, hyper-convergence solutions, software-defined storage and cloud platforms.
We also cover the non-functional test areas for cloud platform as well and the DevOps integration using Jenkins for CI-CD integration, development and automation which runs seamlessly 24*7 on the given platform.
