White PaPer: Cloud ComPuting

As organizations increasingly adopt cloud services, they often face challenges to be sure these services support applications and users as well as, if not better than, previous services. Indeed, a large majority of organizations adopting cloud services have had to rethink their initial cloud deployments, changing processes, management technology, application development and design and more. Finding the right cloud services provider (CSP) is, therefore, critical. This white paper helps organizations find the right CSP by providing tips for defining their requirements for a CSP, and then offering five best practices for choosing the right CSP partner.

rethinking Cloud dePloyments

Over the past year, the cloud has moved from hypothetical to real implementations. As Lydia Leong, an analyst from Gartner, commented, “You’re starting to see production use, rather than just experimental use, and from mainstream companies, not just start-ups.”1 Indeed, a recent report by Cloudtweaks found that 20 percent of organizations surveyed have cloud implementations, while another 61 percent are researching this technology.2 Organizations adopting cloud services are achieving benefits that include pay-per-use billing, scalability, flexibility, burstable capacity and agility.

Yet as cloud implementations move into the mainstream, organizations face challenges assimilating these services into their application ecosystem. A recent EMA survey found that 70 percent of respondents were forced to rethink their initial cloud deployments to more effectively incorporate cloud services into their infrastructure. Among the top changes survey participants have made as a result of employing cloud services were to:

• process and process flows (47 percent)

• management technology adoption for provisioning and managing services (41 percent)

• application development and design (40 percent)

• management technology adoption for service performance management (30 percent)

Given that the cloud is moving from an experiment to an integral part of deploying business-critical applications, how can organizations select the right CSP with which to partner?

1 “Waiting for cloud” Information Age, by Daniel Shane, January 24, 2011

2 “Cloud computing survey finds scalability and cost savings driving cloud adoption,” by Cloudtweaks, June 14,2011

3 “Optimizing Cloud Computing to Support Application Delivery,” by Enterprise Management Associates, July 2010

start by looking Within — define your requirements

Before organizations begin their search for a CSP, they should assess all IT and business requirements, monitoring objectives, provider characteristics and how they want the provider to fit into their extended application infrastructure.

IT AnD BuSInESS REquIREMEnTS

Organizations should start by defining their technical and business requirements. Most existing IT environments are complex, with a wide range of interdependencies. Organizations need to define these interdependencies and how they will impact the move to the cloud. For example, application and infrastructure design requirements cut across domains — databases, storage, application servers and much more. Component interdependencies include Java, .nET, VPns, and wireless as well as virtual server, application and desktop environments.3 Organizations need to define how these existing environments will interact with the cloud.

Different industries also have different requirements that may impact the CSP they select. For example, manufacturing is more likely to employ industry-specific applications that operate in a wide range of technical environments rather than generic CRM/ERP systems. Retail is more likely to track web abandonment rates, share information with suppliers and track their competitors’ performances.

MOnITORInG OBJECTIVES

Even as organizations move to the cloud, most won’t want to lose the control they’ve historically maintained when managing applications in the data center — indeed, they’ll want to extend this control to the end-to-end environment. Issues to consider include load balancing and traffic management, how clients use the site, transaction performance, performance for users in different geographic regions and the actual end-user experience, in addition to the standard availability monitoring measured by most service level agreements.

ChARACTERISTICS OF ThE PROVIDER

Organizations should consider the characteristics of the CSP and what they offer. According to a recent EMA survey, common concerns with CSPs include security/risk/compliance (63 percent), proven performance (55 percent), willingness to commit to SLAs (43 percent) and low cost (43 percent). In addition to scrutinizing how the CSP handles these issues, it is important to find out how to contact them when things go wrong and their willingness to partner to find a solution when problems escalate.

hOW ThE CSP WILL FIT InTO ThE ExTEnDED APPLICATIOn SERVICE ECOSYSTEM

Finally, organizations should determine how cloud services and their CSP will fit into their overall services ecosystem.

• how will these services be used? One use for cloud services is to test drive provider relationships or new services.

• how will they work with the CSP? Who will the organization work with at the CSP? What are the terms of the contract?

• how will they monitor services and validate performance?

• Who are the stakeholders and how will the organization communicate new services to them?

• how critical are the cloud applications to the organization?

• What are the organization’s expectations?

Top decision factors for organizations looking for an external CSP.

five best PraCtiCes for seleCting a Cloud serviCe Provider

Once an organization has mapped out its requirements, it can follow these five best practices to make the right choice of CSP.

1. EnSuRE ThAT DEVELOPERS AnD qA TESTERS hAVE A SEAT AT ThE TABLE

Application performance is critical. Because end-users typically abandon a site after three to four seconds of waiting, slow performance means lost business, lost reputation for the brand and, ultimately, lost revenue.

not surprisingly, performance is a key concern for organizations adopting cloud computing. An EMA study found that 58 percent of companies surveyed in north America have slowed their adoption of cloud services due to concerns about performance. These organizations say they stand to lose an average of $985K due to performance problems.

Application design is, therefore, critical.

With today’s application ecosystem complexity, developers must be involved in specifying application and infrastructure design requirements, as well as CSP selection and implementation, to ensure high levels of performance. Only developers and qA testers really understand how the organization’s applications work and the resources required. Developers also need to maintain high performance over time by designing the application for scale.

Additionally, developers need to help organizations plan for the future from day one. For example, within three years, mobility will become an integral part of many organization’s cloud strategies, and new technology will be required to enable mobility. Organizations need to consider these future technology requirements as part of their initial planning as they adopt cloud services.

2. ChOOSE CLOuD MODELS BASED On TEChnICAL AnD BuSInESS REquIREMEnTS

Organizations have a choice of cloud computing service models. Choices include Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as the option to host these cloud services internally, select an external CSP or use a hybrid infrastructure. To make an informed decision, organizations should map their business and IT requirements defined previously to the strengths and weaknesses of each option.

Choosing a Cloud serviCe model Pros Cons

SaaS is a fully functional pre-built application environment delivered by a CSP

• Eliminates the need to manage the application and infrastructure

• Customer needs to carefully consider SLAs, data portability, long-term costs, security, user management

PaaS is an environment for application development and deployment delivered by a CSP

• Allows developers to create their own scalable applications

• Automatically handles details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto scaling, etc.

• Vendor locked in to a PaaS provider

• Various security concerns, bandwidth limitations, service availability and legal issues such as data privacy and data jurisdiction

IaaS is when the CSP delivers only basic system or machine level services

• Flexibility and autonomy

• Developers have direct access to virtual machines and can create their own server and database instances as needed and install the desired middleware and OS

• Considerable IT know-how required

• Security concerns, bandwidth limitations, service availability and legal issues such as data privacy and data jurisdiction

Public • Particularly useful for “informal” buyers, small to medium sized businesses or enterprise users outside the core IT operations and transaction teams

• questions remain over the enterprise-readiness of these solutions

Private • Provides control of the delivery environment due to application maturity, performance requirements and regulatory or business differentiation issues

• The enterprise does not achieve the cost advantages of the public cloud

• The enterprise must implement and manage the entire infrastructure

Additional considerations for selecting a cloud service model include:

• Who are the subscribers? Are they business units or information architects? For example, CEO or LOB managers require improved business agility and faster time to market while CIOs and IT seek IT efficiency, reliability and business continuity.

• What do subscribers get in terms of service level agreements, reporting and so on?

• What does it cost?

• how much control does the organization have?

• how much control does the service provider have

3. IMPLEMEnT A CLOuD PERFORMAnCE MOnITORInG STRATEGY FROM DAY OnE

With today’s complex application delivery chain, some functionality is typically provided from inside the firewall. Other functionality comes from outside the firewall, and all services are pulled together in the user’s browser. Yet the organization’s IT group is responsible for testing and monitoring the end-to-end performance of the entire web application.

Because functionality can come from inside or outside the firewall and is assembled in the user’s browser, end-user performance monitoring is essential.

users can experience variations in performance due to issues in any one of the end-to-end components of the application, which the organization may or may not control. how can application owners tell if something is creating problems for end-users without visibility into what the end-user is experiencing?

Because functionality can come from inside or outside the firewall and is assembled in the user’s browser, end-user performance monitoring is essential.

Most SLAs from CSPs measure only availability, not performance. Organizations need a solution that can monitor applications the way the users experience them. Such a solution needs to monitor:

• What users do — It should independently monitor key transactions such as online checkout.

• Where they do it — The solution should measure how the system performs for users in different geographic locations. For example, the average or mean response time for users across the country might be within an acceptable 4.5 second range but the results by city can differ significantly. The cloud might provide users in Boston with a response time under two seconds while performance in Denver could reach four seconds and exceed eight seconds on the west coast.

• How they do it — The monitoring solution should measure performance within all the browsers and mobile devices that are likely to be used.

End-user performance for the same service can vary considerably for users in different geographic locations.

Once a monitoring solution detects problems or outages, it should quickly help IT measure their business impact on users so that IT knows which ones are most important and can prioritize their response. The solution also needs to help IT isolate the root cause of problems; for example, whether they originate in the data center, ISP/Internet, third party provider, browser or device.

4. EVALuATE CSPs BASED On IT DESIGn GOALS AnD BuSInESS nEEDS

As organizations evaluate CSPs, they should consider two things: Will they have all the capacity they need when customers demand it? Will the CSP provide consistent service to customers? When considering capacity, look at the following:

• Overall capacity — Evaluate vendors based on capacity goals and then make sure the vendor can handle 15 to 20 percent more than the estimated capacity goals.

• ”Infinite elasticity” doesn’t mean “instant elasticity” — Elasticity refers to how quickly the CSP can ramp up during peak customer usage periods, and only those periods, with the necessary capacity. Just because the cloud offers infinite capacity does not mean that necessary capacity can be added instantly. While most CSPs can increase capacity quickly, delays can occur. To measure elasticity, take baseline measurements of end-user performance before and after a usage spike and test both prior to deployment and in production. Additionally, test elasticity for peak user loads.

• Burstability — Burstability refers to the CSP’s ability to provide additional resources to a single element. To test burstability, isolate cloud services from the rest of the infrastructure and test the failover process.

When evaluating consistency, look at whether the CSP is physically located in the right places to provide consistent service to customers. Internet services that are nearby to users often have better performance than those farther away. Additionally, when sharing resources with other CSP customers, an upsurge in traffic for one can affect others. It is important to determine how well the CSP can handle usage surges.

Compuware Corporation, the technology performance company, provides software, experts and best practices to ensure technology works well and delivers value. Compuware solutions make the world’s most important technologies perform at their best for leading organizations worldwide, including 46 of the top 50 Fortune 500 companies and 12 of the top 20 most visited u.S. web sites. Learn more at: compuware.com.

Compuware Corporation World headquarters • One Campus Martius • Detroit, MI 48226-5099

© 2011 Compuware Corporation

Compuware products and services listed within are trademarks or registered trademarks of Compuware Corporation. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

12.5.11 20381JP

5. EnSuRE PERFORMAnCE GOALS BY COnTInuOuSLY MOnITORInG EnD-uSER ExPERIEnCE

To consistently deliver a high quality end-user experience to web site visitors, best-in-class companies take an outside-in approach to performance monitoring that focuses on the end-user. An end-user experience monitoring solution that continuously monitors performance and that shows the organization the business impact of a particular problem (e.g., how many users are affected) as well as the root cause (e.g., where the problem is located: in the data center, internal content, third part content and so on) allows IT to find and fix problems proactively, before they impact end-users.

When selecting a monitoring solution, look for one that abstracts complexity and presents information in a way that’s relevant to users. The solution should provide alerts and indicators that tell IT where to start looking for problems. It should test performance from a geographic perspective, showing performance in different cities, and it should test from an end-user browser.

An outside-in perspective will allow the organization to validate a CSP’s SLA claim. At the same time, organizations should inform the CSP if they will monitor the performance of the solution from an end-user perspective. By signing up for the shortest possible contract duration from the CSP and putting them on notice regarding end-user monitoring efforts, organizations can gain greater leverage over their CSP.

SLAs typically measure availability, rather than performance from an end-user perspective.

ConClusion

Organizations that plan to incorporate cloud services into their application ecosystem need to find the right CSP and leverage cloud services strategically. Finding the right CSP means carefully defining IT and business requirements and then following best practices in order to:

• make sure developers and qA testers have a seat at the table

• set a standard from which to chose cloud models based on both technical and business requirements

• allow for implementation of a cloud performance monitoring strategy from day one

• provide for an evaluation of cloud service providers, based on IT design goals and business needs

By following these guidelines, organizations can deliver the performance their end-users expect, thereby improving customer satisfaction, competitive advantage and overall profitability.

next stePs

Ready to take back control of e-commerce and reap the full rewards of managing applications via the cloud? Or do you already have an application or site deployed in the cloud?

To learn more about how they perform from different locations, visit: compuware.com/instanttest