Business Needs
New Zealand EPA was upgrading their existing carbon emissions management system (NZEUR) to a new web-based application to significantly improve the user experience and usage. The New Zealand IT Consultant developed the new web-based application inside the government’s own cloud infrastructure.
The purpose of the NZEUR system is to comply with the UN Kyoto Protocol (an international treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to fight global warming). This system is used by organizations and individuals to record, track, manage, and report on carbon units, emissions, and removals. It manages functionality such as
- Account Management
- Financial Reporting
- Carbon Unit Management
|
- Compliancy Status
- Account Monitoring
- Carbon Transfers
|
The environment is load balanced and contained within Active Directory. Upon entering the testing phase of the project, the team was completely blocked from time travelling due to Active Directory running inside the government’s cloud, and thus needed a solution that was both Active Directory and cloud compatible.
Solution
The development team needed a solution that would allow them to overcome their Active Directory obstacle and allow them to quickly integrate time travel as their go-live date was fast approaching. The team chose TimeShiftX as the best solution to meet their testing and environment needs for their critical project.
In this redevelopment project, the system needed to maintain, improve, and ultimately streamline all workflows and functionality of the old system. This meant the required scenarios and workflows needing validation was increased significantly. TimeShiftX gave the developers and testers the ability to run all simulations and validate all migrated and new workflows of the system. The instant time travel of TimeShiftX improved QA efficiency and ultimately accelerated the development timeline.
Benefit
With TimeShiftX, the team was able to time travel seamlessly inside of the EPA’s cloud architecture, without making any environment modifications, and test all their distributed components contained within Active Directory. This freedom allowed full end-to-end testing of the NZEUR carbon emission system workflows and complex eligibility rules, which ultimately increased testing coverage and go-live confidence.
Fast Integration of Time Travel
Deploying and integrating TimeShiftX throughout the load balanced & distributed environment was effortless and took less than 30 minutes. Afterwards, the team was instantaneously time traveling the entire environment. This speedy integration allowed the infrastructure team to focus on core environment tasks while the developers and testers immediately began running simulations. And because TimeShiftX “virtual times” are plug-in-play, there is no custom configuration needed from the app stack and all applications are supported. This frees up the application and database admin’s time and allows the testing team full control of their time travel.
Enabled Time Travel within Active Directory
The domain authentication security protocol that is Active Directory contains a security restriction where a time skew of 5 minutes or more between any servers, kicks the servers off the domain and thus blocks time travel.
However, by utilizing TimeShiftX, the team was able to successfully time travel instantaneously within Active Directory without any environment or server changes. TimeShiftX’ default compatibility enabled the team to time travel seamlessly and meet their go-live date.
Maintained System Reliability
Because of the strict environment policies and Active Directory implementation, the team needed a time travel solution that would ensure the reliability and uptime of the environment. By leveraging TimeShiftX, the development team was able to time travel test easily without worrying about system reliability or adding further complexities. The reason is that TimeShiftX utilizes “virtual time travel” which only applies to the user application space while maintaining root system reliability. This allowed the team to test without worry inside the governments cloud architecture.
