Interconnection between Performance Engineering and Cloud

Business leaders are increasingly relying on cloud technologies to allow their digital transformation strategies and present competitive differentiation of their products or services in today’s global markets. In particular, 87% of companies are already running business-critical applications in the cloud, while 93% contemplate it as a key incentive for digital transformation.

While cloud adoption has gone to the mainstream, CIOs and other IT leaders encounter significant difficulties when performance ensuring their applications in the cloud. In this transformative view, there is a growing shortage of predictability as apps, data, and users are spread over multiple locations and networks. Combining this unpredictability is a loss of vital IT architecture and legacy performance testing tools that are retrofitted for a cloud that wasn’t intended to deliver on the required outcome.

 A CIO’s ability to drive these architectural complexities, choice of the right set of tools underpinning the delivery method are crucial to ensuring application performance and harnessing the powerful advantages that the cloud can offer.

Performance testing in Cloud Environments

We are moving on from monolithic performance engineering to cloud performance engineering with some features that should be done consciously and purposely. Performance engineering on the cloud is complicated and difficult to handle than monolithic applications. Although the cloud is scalable but benchmarking, profiling and data analysis is very complex due to multiple dependencies and the growing frequency of code changes.

Not all cloud migrations work; few reasons they fail are due to the complexity around provinces with existing applications, shortage of good resources with service providers, diverse systems that cannot be automated, duplication of methods, business not embracing new technologies, and pits between business and IT groups.

The Six prime pillars that should be section of the Performance Engineering strategy for cloud applications should be –

• Shared Infrastructure on Cloud is the most significant factor to consider. Co-tenants can utilize more resources (I/O, CPU, Bandwidth, Memory, and different resources) that can affect user experience significantly. Many organizations can decrease network precincts by private (dedicated possession) but virtualization risks will still exist and require to be considered. Monitoring software (Ex: CloudWatch for AWS) should be used to capture, measure, and present insights for proactive management of problems that could arise.

• Monitoring (Infrastructure and Application) is another important aspect to be considered. Monitoring of hardware and software on shared infrastructure is a requirement. Cloud native monitors like Amazon Cloud Watch provide integration into current monitoring dashboards.

• Performance testing and tuning should be acknowledged based on type of implementation, network stricture, IOPS, integration points, and dataflow. Most applications are produced with FAAS (Function as a service) concept to support serverless architecture that requires to be well understood. Today we have hook.io, AWS lambda, Oracle Cloud Fn services, S3, BLOB,  Openwhisk, Ceph, DynamoDB, Redis, Cloudstack storage services, & Cassandra DB services.

• Resilience validation techniques should be part of the strategy description. For the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) validation, virtualization methods should be used. Data replication and synchronization should be constantly validated, Server provisioning should be automated (including self-healing) and Chaos tests to be conducted on Micro-Services.

• Security (Vulnerability, Static Application Secure testing, and Penetration) testing should be done at a regular cadence. Developed code is deployed on a shared infrastructure that should be defended against outside attacks, which can create a catastrophe.

• Usability validation is another crucial aspect to be encapsulated in the test pipeline. Accessibility confirmation should be given in an automated fashion, to assure hosted applications comply with regulatory requirements.

Network Bandwidth and Latency Matters

 Moving applications and data to the cloud requires new demands on the corporate network and changes two performance constraints: bandwidth and latency.  Not getting the true ramifications of these two limitations can easily offset the demanded business value of moving to the cloud in the first place.

During and after the migration, bandwidth utilization increments, and traffic patterns begin to change significantly. Quite frequently, network links become saturated, which can degrade the end-user experience of both current applications and the newly deployed cloud application.

Furthermore, in traditional network architectures, cloud directed traffic is often backhauled to a central gateway positioned in the corporate data center for security purposes. As a result, cloud applications end up going a long distance to reach users when compared to current on-premises equivalents. Hence, the time it takes to make a business transaction may raise, sometimes dramatically, due to the added latency.

By running “what-if” scenarios, you can predict the influence of change on application response times before you move to the cloud, and then evaluate the effects of adjustments done to network and application parameters.

Get Visibility into Application Performance before and after App migration

 Application migration is a journey, where performance difficulties do occur, but when they do, IT leaders require the ability to quickly pinpoint and fix the issues.

Why? Because now that the application has been moved or is in the process of being moved to a cloud provider’s ecosystem, IT is relinquishing some administrative authority. The enterprise no longer holds or has direct access to the infrastructure the application is now hosted. While cloud providers give performance SLAs, those stop at the corner of the cloud. Yet, IT is still accountable for the ongoing performance and safety of cloud apps or services

Bringing back some level of clarity and control is important to maintaining performance and a consistent user experience in the cloud during the migration process and beyond

Having proper application performance monitoring devices in place enables IT organizations to minimize mean time to resolution (MTTR), reducing support tickets, and cutting technical expenses related to transferring and supporting the cloud application. And when performance issues arise from the cloud provider’s services, it enables IT to quickly escalate and keep the providers accountable for agreed-upon SLAs.

Complexity and unpredictability can make assuring the performance of applications moving to the cloud complex for IT Teams. TestUnity Experts can help you run massively scalable, open-source-based performance tests on all apps, be it web, mobile, microservices, or APIs from the cloud or behind the firewall to decrease risk, assuring superior performance, and achieve predictable business outcomes. Connect with our experts to know more about our services. 

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