I have been meaning to address the impact that cloud computing has on performance engineering but haven’t had the time to rigorously tackle this issue. After all, there are serious implications both for vendors that deliver applications and services from the Cloud as well as enterprises that are rapidly migrating more and more services to both internal and external computing clouds.
Which is why I was glad to stumble upon Shamus McGillicuddy article in www.searchenterpriseWAN.com titled “WAN engineers prepare networks as cloud computing adoption rises” that can be found here.
There are some good observations in the article, I especially appreciate the comment on how application architecture best practices such as minimizing application turns become key when developing applications for the Cloud as well as testing applications for network latency becomes critical as the enterprise is migrating more and more applications to the Cloud.
Many questions still remain though and the impact of Cloud computing on performance engineering is still to be determined. Some of the questions that are on my mind are: (and feel free to chime in with more questions or attempts at answers)
1. How do you manage the performance of an application in the Cloud?
2. What changes if any are needed to the service deployment model and version upgrades?
3. How do you conduct a performance test for an application or a service in the Cloud (internal clouds and external clouds)?
4. How do you troubleshoot a performance issue in the Cloud?
Something to think about…
Best,
Amichai Lesser
Leave a Reply