Cloud Connect Conference – Managing Cloud Environments Brings Challenges
I had the opportunity a few weeks ago at the Cloud Connect conference to co-chair a half-day workshop on Cloud Performance Optimization. The consensus from the mix of site operators, content providers and vendors is that monitoring and measuring the performance of cloud applications is critical.
“Cloud-served” applications can be a complex mix of content and application logic that is served from multiple locations. Unlike “conventional” client-server applications of the past, no single set of server- or application- oriented performance optimization metrics would be relevant for cloud-served online applications. In the cloud, the only constant is where the application comes together – at the end user’s browser.
Often the cloud-served portion of an application is outside of a site operator’s direct control, even though they are ultimately responsible for the delivery performance of that content. A universal topic of discussion was about how to be sure that users are getting the application performance and availability that keeps users satisfied.
Managing cloud environments brings many challenges that traditional monitoring options can’t solve because the metrics they measure like CPU, memory and disk utilization, network bandwidth, etc. aren’t meaningful in the virtualized cloud computing model as far as application performance is concerned.
Ultimately, the goal is to overcome the visibility gap between IT executives and their web applications no matter how the applications are served. What’s abundantly clear is that understanding the user experience provides a single point with which to judge how effective sites are – and understand how effective the cloud actually is. Knowing the user perspective assists in governing IT effectiveness at the senior executive level and also helps find problems so that IT operations professionals can fix performance issues quickly. Coradiant has been dedicated to the approach of knowing the user experience since 2000. It’s great to see this approach taking hold as more and more applications move to the cloud.
