It’s a simple statement, but a powerful one that will change the existing application lifecycle management paradigm. At Shunra, we have been working hard, together with our partners, at developing and defining a new performance management model that completes the existing APM  frameworks. This post is a first in a series of posts that describe this model and the motivation behind it. In this first post, I will present the reasons why now, more than ever, such a model is needed – why the time is right. Future posts will dive deeper into the definition and building blocks of the application performance engineering model, explore where this model is applicable and explain the benefits it promises.

Application performance is still a problem.

Despite increased investment in application performance management and monitoring solutions, applications in production continue to fail to meet critical performance requirements. These failures create productivity loss for end users who cannot quickly accomplish the tasks the application was designed to facilitate. These failures result in lost revenue from eCommerce and other consumer services abandonment. And, these failures increase remediation costs as time and resources are required to isolate, diagnose and resolve performance problems in production.

Why now?

Application performance is still a problem – this is not a new concept, but it bears repeating. I could have written that sentence 5 or 10 years ago, and it would have held true then, just as it does now. So, why is the time right (or better said, why is the time right now) for a new and better approach to application performance management?

Today’s ever more complex enterprise environment and increasingly distributed application architectures (and user populations) are making the challenge of effectively managing application performance more difficult. New performance risks are arising from three Enterprise IT waves that are converging upon us today:

1)            The infrastructure paradigm shift – the economic downturn has accelerated the move towards data center centralization including, on an accelerating basis, Cloud migrations and associated cost benefits. Enterprise IT is expected to manage these complex projects to realize the promised savings, without impacting performance or end user productivity.

2)            The technology paradigm shift– several new technologies are redefining the way data is delivered to users including virtualization of servers and desktops, unified communications and Web 2.0.  As Web 2.0 technologies are rapidly being adopted in the enterprise, new smart browser-based capabilities are being introduced which blur the lines between where data resides and how and when it will be transferred across the network. In addition, and growing at an even more remarkable pace, is the mobile revolution. Organizations are increasingly challenged to deliver consumer-like applications, capable of handling enterprise grade data volumes, to an ever more demanding and mobile workforce.

3)            The reality of the “Virtual Remote Office” – the virtual office which was a forward looking concept just 10 years ago, is a reality for an increasingly growing workforce. In addition, the scope of the “virtual office” is expanding beyond the residential “home office” to include trains, planes, coffee shops and hotels. Today’s workforce is expected to be productive anywhere they can access a network connection, placing a tremendous dependency on the networks for how well applications will perform.

This “perfect storm” or confluence of Enterprise IT waves makes it difficult to deploy and gain confidence in the performance of applications. As application performance continues to become more dependent on the network, confidence in application performance will continue to decrease. This necessitates increased focus on how applications behave across a variety of networks including WAN, Internet, Mobile and Cloud.

What do companies do today and why isn’t it enough?

Traditional approaches to performance management include Application Performance Monitoring. This approach, however, offers only partial relief. Performance monitoring is a solid approach to discovering and diagnosing problems that result from the interaction of applications and networks in production. That is the key – performance monitoring is a reactive solution to discovering issues in production. And, because no application is perfect, performance monitoring is critical to performance management.

Discovering and fixing problems in production, though often required, is costly.  Remediation can require re-engineering or significant infrastructure investments that can be difficult to plan in a firefighting mode. There are time pressures and cost sensitivity issues since end users are being affected and application development and testing costs have already been allocated and incurred. Performance monitoring solutions help improve MTTR, but they cannot offset the time and resource costs associated with poor performance in production and poor end user experience.

What is missing?

More forward-thinking companies are moving away from the break-firefight-fix cycle and are beginning to augment their APM strategy with a more proactive, pre-production approach to performance management. This new approach leverages Application Performance Engineering best practices to reduce performance remediation costs, increase monetization and ensure end-user productivity. To be successful, this approach relies on a precise replica of the production environment for identifying poor performing business-process-steps in advance of deployment. This does not necessarily mean recreating the network hardware in the QA lab, but enabling a precise emulation of the hardware and production network conditions or impairments. With an APE-enabled test lab, these companies can effectively and reliably investigate performance optimization solutions, be confident in their network and performance decisions, and validate real-world application response times in advance of deploying to an end user community across networks – WAN, Web, Mobile and Cloud.

In my next post, I will dive deeper into defining the goal of Application Performance Engineering and the associated building blocks that make up this model.

In the mean time, I am looking for your feedback:

• What else is missing in how application performance is being managed?
• How do you view the application performance engineering goal?
• What do you think needs to be in the application performance engineering model?

The content in this post has been co-developed with Bill Varga, the COO of Shunra and Marty Brandwin, Director of Product Marketing at Shunra. Many parts in it were influenced by thoughts and comments from most of the executive team at Shunra and our partner community.

Looking forward to your comments,

Amichai Lesser

The FCC’s tool lets you measure download and upload speeds, as well as latency and jitter (the last two are important for video and voice applications).  Nobody talks about latency and jitter and that is a shame.  For high quality video conferencing, less than 20ms of jitter is best.  Latency less than 30 ms is excellent. 

If you want to test your Internet connection, you must choose what type of consumer are you, home or commercial, including street address and zip code.

The test include upload and download speeds and latency and jitter to the service provider. Results are comparable to speedtest.net, a site that also utilizes OOKLA technology.

The FCC site also provides an Iphone application to measure network performance on a WI-FI network using a smart phone.

If your Iphone is connected to a WI-FI network, your results will reflect the speed of your broadband connection. If you disable Wi-Fi and then perform the test, the results will reflect the performance on the 3G network provided by At&T.

I believe this to be a great step to forcing greater transparency in the Internet access space and eventually will force Service providers to increase speed and lower costs.

There are many challenges organizations face when it comes to administering and maintaining a dedicated pre-production or staging environment for which accurate performance testing can be conducted. The cost to manage and maintain infrastructure, along with personnel and facilities, can be fairly sizeable and are only a subset of the overall costs to be considered. So, in many cases performance testing can be rather expensive and this is exactly why virtualization can provide significant benefits because there is cost reduction across the board. A prime example is in many performance labs there are a variety of application performance tools typically utilized for testing – one such tool is HP LoadRunner or Performance Center. These tools are a primary part of a performance lab as they provide load generation capabilities and can accurately test applications under real world load and stress scenarios. However, these solutions require a significant amount of infrastructure and resources (A Controller to execute tests, LoadRunner Generators to produce user traffic, Virtual User Generator to record scripts, etc.) and this can make it very difficult to manage the environment when it has to scale to meet higher demand. In this case, virtualization saves time, effort and cost because resources can be allocated dynamically within the environment and any number of virtual machines can be leveraged when needed to handle these resource intensive applications. This is also enabling many organizations to architect and customize elegant configurations that more closely align with their testing requirements – which can minimize unnecessary infrastructure and resources. Yet, the prevalent issue many organizations still grapple with is how to execute performance tests that accurately depict the network for which the application will be deployed across.

The most pervasive approach that many organizations would take is to physically deploy hardware (remote load generators) in offices that they wanted to test an application from. This process was not only time-consuming, but also expensive, inaccurate and cumbersome to manage. For this reason, HP decided to form a partnership with Shunra to develop a seamless solution that provides this capability within the HP LoadRunner and Performance Center solutions – Shunra VE Desktop for HP. This solution aligns very well with the virtualization movement because it is simply a plug-in within the HP products that introduces the network into the existing test bed and can be leveraged across most virtual platforms. For LoadRunner 9.5 and later, there is simply a “WAN emulation” tab that can be accessed from within the Controller to introduce the latency, jitter, packet loss and bandwidth constraints directly into the test. With Performance Center 9.5 and later, this capability can easily be configured directly from the browser UI to allocate WAN emulation parameters across any number of desired load generators. A consequence of this is that organizations can leverage on-demand performance testing from a dynamic virtual environment that is agile, flexible and robust. This therefore eliminates the need to manage testing cycles across multiple time zones and remove any need for additional hardware. Additionally, all of the network metrics from each generator utilizing WAN emulation within the test will automatically be imported into the controller, which can save a significant amount of time when collating results and generating analysis reports. These reasons are precisely why numerous organizations have decided to improve their existing performance test environment with the VE Desktop for HP Software  solution. Not only does this solution address a strategic gap within the functionality of the HP solutions, it embraces virtualization as a means to more effectively administer performance testing. Overall, the VE Desktop for HP Software solution was co-developed with HP to considerably enhance the accuracy and value of these application performance test suites.

Netflix is distributing among thousands of its subscribers an online survey (see below) to float the idea of a new streaming service, this time targeting Iphone users. If you are a Netflix subscriber, you can enjoy instant access to thousands of movies on their “instant access” service, allowing users to stream content directly from the company’s servers, using a PC or dedicated devices. Today this technology is based on Adobe Flash ®.   This is not available to Apple oriented users (MAC, Iphone or IPad) and the survey indicates a willingness to part ways with Flash, a move being contemplated by many content providers, in order to facilitate streaming and other dynamic context to non Microsoft platforms.

The Iphone has been out in the market for a couple of years and it is the debut of the IPad that is prompting services and vendors to ramp up their offerings for the Apple platforms. I guess the Iphone service will be just a dress rehearsal for the real thing, Netflix streaming movie content to the IPad. Another indication that IPad is the real target, is that the service will initially work only on Wi-Fi and not on 3G, resembling the Apple offering on the lower end IPad platform.

On February 17, the Chairman of the FCC (Federal Communication Commission), Julius Genachowski, proposed a decade long program to provide a minimum of 100 MBPS link access to every household in the US.  The Chairman said the FCC plan would set “ambitious but achievable goals” in remarks to the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners conference.

Genachowski said speedier Internet service would help create jobs and economic growth.

Data shows that about 64 percent of U.S. households used a high-speed Internet service in 2009, the Commerce Department said on Tuesday. That is a 25 percent increase from 51 percent two years earlier.

Some internet providers already called this program “unrealistic”, given the current estimate of the average access speed at less than 4 MBPS. However, Verizon, the third-largest provider, and one that has a more advanced network than many competitors, said it has completed successful trials of 100 Mbps and higher through its fiber-optic FiOS network. Today, Verizon offers programs with 50 MBPS access, at a premium.

The FCC announcement should not come as s a surprise, given Google announcement from the beginning of February that it will pilot a deployment of 100 MBPS links to certain communities. Not surprising, the first newspaper to report this development was the Korean Times, the country with the most widely available high speed Internet service for home consumers.

Why 100 MBPS matters? Obviously, it will open the possibility for stay home Moms to join the work force by becoming part of corporate networks; will open great opportunities for home-schooling connected to on-line interactive schools and colleges and open a whole new world of entertainment and leisure activities, like interactive TV, collaborative gaming, real-time social interaction and more.

The key message is very clear – BIG pipes and FASTER applications are on the way.  We need to ensure this new environment can handle our demands.  Shunra technologies allow you to emulate the network environment, introducing real world impairments to test those media rich applications in a controlled lab environment. Shunra has been providing this capability for more than 10 years and now, more than ever, is the time to prepare.

Since the January 27^th announcement, it has become public knowledge that also Google is about to release a smart tablet, as well as HP using a Windows 7 platform. So are we reaching critical mass? I believe we are reaching the point tablets cannot longer be ignored.  Before the end of the year you will be able to receive TV streams into your tablet, read E-books, use your favorite social network, including the latest addition, Goggle “Buzz”, order pizza for dinner and yes, check your email and place both video or voice conference calls.

On an interview with the Associated Press, Disney’s CEO, Robert Iger, as quoted at the blog TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Blog,  he depict different scenarios using IPAD to deploy games, media and gaming content, all of it oriented toward the non-technical audiences.

Apple is drawing heavily on the experience gained by both IPod Touch and Iphone, that  in only a couple  of  years had managed to become the industry standard for smart web appliances and smart phones. The primary audience is the millions of users who are too afraid or reluctant to use a laptop/netbook since they are too rigidly bound to an unfriendly Windows OS.  A typical tablet user doesn’t want to use a computer per se.

So, why this is relevant to this blog? Very simple, all the context, media, games, TV shows, music and E-books will be delivered over ever increasing congested networks, served from ever more complex infrastructures at all will require substantial testing. What better tool to test a distributed network that Shunra Virtual Enterprise?  Application providers will have to test their application before deploying them to the millions of users. What will be the user experience, how latency will impact an IPAD user watching 2011 Super Bowl or downloading the latest chapter of their favorite TV show?

The combination of testing for 3G readiness (see other posts in this blog) and end user experience assessment will be a key factor on the success of this game changer.

Shunra VE is the best way to prepare for this new wave of context and delivery mechanism.

Given the application traffic requirements, the challenge is not going to be the amount of traffic (Throughput) , but rather the network conditions, or impairments, that are affecting how the application traffic is going to be transmitted over the network, eventually arriving at the corporate data center south of the nation’s capital.

Using VE Catcher 4.6, a model of the latency and packet loss characteristics was created, for a period of 10 days. Two separate devices where utilized, on one AT&T 3G network, the other, on the Sprint network, to ensure carrier availability (the project call for a 50% split among the networks).  A pilot site, south of the data center, was selected, and VE Catcher created two parallel recordings, one for device “A” and another for device in the alternative carrier.

Once the behavioral model has been created, Shunra’s Virtual Enterprise appliance will allow creating a “test-bed” where the application will be sending real traffic to the data center over an emulated link. The network conditions will be imported from VE Catcher and reflect the exact conditions observed at each of the 3G carriers.

The performance of the application, running over the emulated links will allow the testing team to predict the behavior of the application well before field deployment is completed, and make adjustments required by the application and also predict behavior under extreme conditions, like heavy network traffic, inclement weather or other events.

You may not always use WAN emulation, but when you do, use Shunra.

Shunra Virtual Enterprise is your guaranty to a successful deployment.

By fiscal year 2013, the policy will require agencies to provide details and road maps on their plans for adopting cloud-based technologies. This story has been corroborated at a post at the Federal News Radio website.

This is the latest indication that the Government is getting very serious about the implementation of a Federal Cloud, starting by all the civilian agencies. During 2009, several groups have been established to test feasibility and learn how much it can be saved hardware and infrastructure.

The drive, accordingly to David Lithicum is obviously cost, the OMB believe that moving to a Federal “Cloud” may save significant amount of money and effort on multiple layers of data centers, equipment, personnel,  facilities costs and power consumption.   A Federal “Cloud” from sea to shining sea my provide coverage for many agencies and projects, however, this is the place to emphasize that performance will be impacted by the location of the user and the distance to the server.  In a “Cloud” environment, testing for latency impact is paramount.

The agencies implementing “Cloud” will have to spend significant efforts testing for latency impact on the application performance, as well as mitigation strategies, like acceleration, mirroring and also distributed cashing.

Shunra technologies can provide the perfect test bed for a Cloud environment, by recreating the operational conditions before and after the move to the “Cloud” and providing empirical evidence of the latency impact on the applications.

When do these issues become as important in LANs as they are in WANs? Probably when our LAN becomes huge – such as Cloud computing Data Centers.

These Data Centers are interconnected with each other and one of the main differences with our traditional Data Centers is that they are managed automatically by very complex and smart management systems. These systems are capable of automatically allocate hardware and software resources for our applications, maintain these resources and expand/decrease capacity of the infrastructure based on the application demands almost in real time.

So imagine that the system is scheduled to perform an OS upgrade on the managed infrastructure: it will download OS images on thousands of machines thus creating huge traffic congestion within the Data Center. What will happen to the system that knows only how to work on LAN and was never tested on coping with delays? Packet Loss? – it might go down partially or completely. Since it was not tested – how can we know? (Sounds a little like Skynet scenario in Terminator, doesn’t it?)

The importance of the management system performance becomes utmost in this case and it makes sense to test how the system will react to the issues that now might happen within it, doesn’t it?

This is where WAN emulation solution can help – it can create those conditions within the Data Center or between the Cloud Data Centers and the “unexpected” can become “expected” and fixed.