Posts tagged ‘cloud computing’
Concerned about Application Performance in the Cloud? Ask These Questions First
By Russell Rothstein
February 22, 2011
Many companies are developing their strategy for migration of business applications to private and public clouds. During this critical stage, it is vital to ensure that service levels are not impacted by migrating the application from dedicated to shared IT resources. It’s no wonder that according to analyst firm IDC, two of the top three concerns that CIO’s have about private clouds are performance and availability.
We see in the market that enterprises are forming new cloud teams and internal committees, with a diverse set of skills, to plan for an effective organizational cloud strategy. One of their mandates in the organization’s journey to cloud is to plan for how to monitor and manage the performance and behavior of applications after deployment. These organizations undoubtedly have a range of infrastructure monitors in the data center. And most cloud service providers, whether internal or external, will provide services for monitoring cloud resources. Yet these tools typically do not provide an accurate picture of what end users are truly experiencing and how to quickly isolate and fix performance issues in application components located inside and/or outside the cloud.
This blog entry points out a few of the key application performance challenges that you are likely to encounter when pursuing a cloud strategy, so that you can address them proactively. I hope that during my session in the Cloud Performance Summit at CloudConnect (Instrumenting Applications When Access Goes Away on Monday March 7) the esteemed panel will address some of these challenges with a variety of perspectives – it should be informative and thought-provoking!
1. How do you know if an application is ready for the cloud?
Not all applications are ready for “cloud time”, and sometimes one part of an application is cloud ready while other components are not. You need to identify the best components for migration as well as potential problems such as chattiness and latency that are amplified in the cloud.
2. How do you find server-related root causes when performance issues arise?
In fully-dedicated environments, we sometimes use infrastructure metrics and events to diagnose performance issues. But inferring application performance from tier-based statistics becomes challenging – if not impossible – when applications share dynamically allocated resources. In the cloud, you must be able to understand application performance and its correlation with the underlying physical and virtual components.
3. How can you minimize the risk of change to the cloud infrastructure or the application?
In a shared environment, any change to the application, or to the infrastructure, is high risk. Cloud owners, operations staff and application teams must be able to test the impact of change on service delivery – whether that change is in an application before deployment, or in the cloud infrastructure.
4. How do you implement or verify chargeback?
Traditional application performance monitoring (APM) tools do not collect resource utilization per transaction to enable business-aligned costing and chargeback paradigms. For the cloud, you need a solution that monitors consumption for every service across multiple applications and tiers, so you can accurately cost services, decide on appropriate chargeback schemes, and tune applications and infrastructure for better resource utilization and lower cost.
5. How do you ensure that services are allocated according to business priority?
To ensure that SLAs in the cloud are met, you must be able to prioritize the allocation of resources based on measurements of real end user performance and an accurate view of where additional resources can truly alleviate SLA risks. To make that possible, you need a clear picture of resource consumption at the transaction level and business intelligence about the impact of each infrastructure tier on performance.
6. How can you maintain a real-time up-to-date view of how each service flows through the cloud when VMs are moving around dynamically?
In the cloud more than ever, you need a real-time picture of service dependencies that does not need to be manually updated. The environment is simply too dynamic (e.g. so called “VMotion sickness”) to make it feasible to keep manual models and static infrastructure dependency maps up to date.
7. How can you right-size capacity and prevent over-provisioning that undercuts ROI?
In the cloud, a complete history of all transaction instances, including precise resource utilization metrics and SLAs, is essential for making intelligent decisions about provisioning. And with an accurate picture of resource consumption for each business transaction, cloud owners can plan future capacity requirements (e.g. servers, storage, VMs, databases) in the most cost-efficient manner possible.
February 22, 2011 at 3:47 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
Cloud Requires a New IT Employee (Hint: MBA May Be Required)
We've come a long way since the IBM 3270. Or have we?
By Russell Rothstein
December 6, 2010
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
Cloud computing is heralding the most significant shift in IT skill sets since we displaced the armies of punch card operators with the IBM 3270. Cloud is a realization of utility computing, where whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. As Gartner says in a recent report, private cloud services “will require a cultural and political change inside of IT to see the role of operations move to being more proactive — requiring predefined policies, service levels and automated actions to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. This requires very different skills over time — a shift away from rote work toward more planning, service analysis and a better understanding of service users in order to continually improve how the service is ultimately delivered.” (Source: Gartner “Key Considerations in the Development of a Private Cloud Architecture”, August 23, 2010).
The key phrase used by Gartner is that IT personnel will require “a better understanding of service users”, which means a better understanding the business which is what’s driving the users to consume those IT services. In essence, cloud will necessitate IT to be more business focused. We have been talking about Business/IT alignment for too long now without sufficient progress; with the emergence of cloud models, this is no longer a choice – either IT upgrades to a business-centric service delivery function, or is ultimately to be replaced by outsourced cloud service providers that can provide utility computing services with greater cost efficiencies. That’s why Business Transaction Management, or BTM, must be at the center of your cloud management capabilities, in order to effectively plan for and manage cloud services from a business perspective. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll get the opinions from CIOs in the industry to understand their plans to address this rapidly changing environment.
To close up, it’s interesting to understand the new roles in IT that Gartner sees as emerging in order to support the delivery of new private cloud services:
- Cloud service architect (new role): Designs and documents the end-to-end cloud platform
- Portal developer: Develops interfaces that cloud consumers use to requisition services
- Workflow specialist: Defines requirements for instantiating automated processes
- Configuration management specialist: Develops consistent packaging and policy-conflict-free service deployment methods
We trust you are already filling these roles in your IT organization. And while these may not be the best the job in the world, but they most certainly beat a career as a roustabout.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
The Oscars of Private Cloud Management
By Russell Rothstein
March 7, 2010
It was fun to watch the Academy Awards this year – a glitzy evening replete with glamorous movie stars, stylish attire, and most importantly to those of us from the software industry, totally cool computer-generated characters. (Unless you preferred to spend the evening watching your favorite Super Bowl commercial for the umpteenth time or the latest OK Go video instead.) It’s a night where aspiring actors and screenwriters silently wish that next year they’ll get that break to make it to the Oscars, and we wish we had taken that extra course in computer graphics in college, observing the box-office proceeds from Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.
And while OpTier won’t be releasing a 3-D feature film any time soon, we do believe a multi-dimensional approach is critical to that new genre of enterprise IT service management – managing private clouds. Private clouds are becoming more pervasive – according to Gartner, by 2012 enterprises will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private cloud services because of improvements in cost and management efficiency.
OpTier BTM provides performance management, resource management, and cost-based accounting for private clouds
That’s where the 3-D approach comes in. Some enterprises erroneously assume that since virtualization is the enabling technology for clouds, then virtualization-centric management systems are sufficient for managing cloud-based services. In effect, they are extending the flawed silo-based APM approach to IT management by applying another one-dimensional toolset to manage virtual hosts and guests in the cloud. (It’s no surprise that in these cases, when a performance issue occurs in the cloud – everyone first blames the “VM guy”.)
OpTier takes a multi-dimensional approach to the cloud. In order to provide true end-to-end service management in the cloud, you need to include visibility into both virtual and physical metrics. Only with a business transactional-based approach do you have 3-D visibility to cover the three key dimensions of transactions that flow through the cloud:
- Time per transaction (i.e. cloud performance management)
- Resource utilization per transaction (i.e. cloud capacity management)
- Cost per transaction (i.e. chargeback and activity-based costing for the cloud)
Frost and Sullivan found that two of the top three concerns about cloud are loss of control and availability. OpTier’s business transaction management approach to private clouds is the most efficient manner to address these concerns – enabling organizations to take control and assure 24/7 availability of services in the cloud.
So the OpTier 3-D feature film may be off in the future, but for some time already, OpTier customers have been using OpTier BTM’s 3-dimensional approach to manage services in the cloud on a daily basis. Now that’s worth an Oscar speech.
Cloud Computing: Something New Under the Sun?
By Russell Rothstein
January 25, 2010
As we reflect upon the past decade, many of us will use the 1960’s as the yardstick to measure the intellectual output, creativity, and innovation that was brought into the world over a ten-year period. The music of the Sixties brought us the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel. In film, Hitchcock’s Psycho and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In politics, JFK and Martin Luther King. And in technology, spaceflight, BASIC programming language, and, of course…cloud computing.
The Computer History Museum in Boston recently released a vintage film from 1963 on the topic of timesharing, one of the most important developments in computing, and one which has come in and out of favor several times over the last several decades as the dichotomy between remote and centrally-managed computing resources played out. The latest incarnation for centrally-managed computing resources is none other than cloud computing.
The video is fascinating, demonstrating that while we’ve come a long way in eyewear fashion, the basic paradigms of computing have not changed much over the past 45 years. Watch the video, especially the last 3 minutes, and you’ll hear the MIT professor extol the benefits of shared infrastructure and what sounds familiar to us as elastic computing in the cloud.
And while we’ll agree that there are significant differences between mainframe-based time sharing and cloud computing, it’s key to note that in both computing paradigms, there is need to attain visibility into the performance and resource utilization of what they called “programs” in the video (note the interviewer’s final question about the elapsed time of the transaction,) and what we call business transactions today.
And if you’re interested more in the topic of achieving visibility in the cloud, register for next week’s webinar on the top five capabilities for cloud computing success with special guest Mary Johnston Turner of IDC.
January 25, 2010 at 11:15 am Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
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