CloudShare Best Practices
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Our main focus at CloudShare is your productivity. In an effort to make sure you can be as productive as possible, I’ve put together the following guide to ProPlus Best Practices.
Teams
A team consists of multiple developers working on the same projects in CloudShare. Teams can be setup in one of the following two ways:
1) One account owns all environments and shares with team members.
2) Everybody owns environments in separate accounts.
Best Practice?
Teams should have a centralized account that owns all the environments. Use a general corporate email address (ex- dev@cloudshare.com) and share the credentials for that account with two-three individuals for change management purposes. Environments can be shared from the centralized account with team members. Team members should login to CloudShare with credentials that are tied to their own company email address.
Teams should establish a policy for when snapshots of environments will be taken. Snapshots should be taken at least once a month by a team designated environment owner and then shared with all other team members.
If working in multiple environments, teams should refer to the Multiple Environments section of this post.
You do not want to invite more then 5 team members to an environment as this will results in developer conflicts.
Source Repository
The code you store in a source repository is pre-production, but the repository itself is production. If you’re a team of 2-3, using Team Foundation Server (TFS) within CloudShare makes sense. If your team is larger, however, best practice is to have source repository on-prem or with a production cloud provider.
When using TFS, make sure to create a VPN connection from CloudShare to your local network or make sure TFS is available to the web. More details on that here.
Multiple Environments
All CloudShare customers should have a Base Environment for all activity. This is where you start every single project, as if it were your own template. Whenever you start an additional project, create a copy of your base environment to get started.
If you’re an Independent Software Vendor:
Recommended setup for Sales: Base Environment, Sales Enablement Environment (setup sales enablement environments to match how your product is sold: per sales group, per product group, per sales region, some combination of these), Demo Environment (setup demo environments: per sales group, per product group, per sales region, some combination of these)
Recommended setup for Development: Base Environment, Development Environment, Demo Environment (within Demo, at least 1 environment for each of the following: per sales group, per product group, some combination of these), QA Environment
If you’re a System Integrator:
Recommended setup: Base Environment and One Environment per Project OR one Environment per Developer
If you’re using CloudShare for Training:
Recommended setup for a Lab – Technical Training- Base Environment per Course, Share a permalink of the base environment with each student
Recommended setup for a Lab – NonTechnical Training – Base Environment per Course, One Environment per Student
If you’re Corporate IT:
Recommended setup for Functional Testing: Base Environment and One Environment per Test Scenario (application, new software, POCs)
CloudShare
The following is a list of CloudShare specific best practices:
- Submit feedback to CloudShare all the time
- Talk to our support line – support@cloudshare.com
- Tweet about @CloudShare on a regular basis
- Like us on Facebook
- Watch our YouTube videos and share those videos via Twitter and Facebook
- Play all of our social games
- Participate in Community Templates for the Solution Showcase
Training
DO NOT DO TRAININGS IN TRIAL for the following reasons:
1) You’ll make Avi, our mechanic, very angry
2) Trial users are walled making it very difficult to guarantee that the experience for each of your students is uniform.
3) Conducting training in trial is risking the underperformance of environments
4) We don’t allow it and we’ll be forced to block your access
CloudShare ProPlus is best used for training in labs. Why? Labs are self-paced and students can be working in environments on their own time. Classroom training, on the other hand, means students are working in CloudShare environments concurrently. This type of training is best suited to our Enterprise training product.
CloudFolders
CloudFolders are used to transfer information back and forth from your VMs. The information should always be changing and temporary. For permanent files, use a service such as dropbox or box.
Machine Access
Always use the plug-in RDP. It is accelerated and results in greater performance.
Template Rage
Don’t have template rage. If you are unable to avoid the feeling – take a deep breath. It will pass. Then, remember that you are a tech nerd and you can fix whatever problem it is you’re having because with CloudShare, you have FULL CONTROL of your VMs. Also, write down your idea for a new template and follow these instructions.
Happy Cloudsharing!
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