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Minggu, 08 Mei 2011

Cloud Computing and Its APM

When someone walks in to a dark room & flips a switch, the room turns bright instantaneously. That is what users expect when they click or touch their business or personal application (App) tabs - instant responses. They may seldom get there for all user applications - but Google's pre-rendering in the work of web search is there. Application Performance Management (APM) techniques are what they must help corporations approach such lofty goals.

APM plays an important role when corporations consolidate their knowledge centers. Virtualization made centralizing the knowledge centers, in to or a handful, even more from cost savings & operations point of view. With Cloud computing in the horizon, corporations can benefit from a variety of choices from public to private Cloud & Infrastructure-as-a service to Application-as-a service.

Corporations following best practices tend to incorporate APM issues right in the planning stages of knowledge middle or Cloud migration. A tiny fraction of the millions of dollars spent on migration itself provides lovely assurance that the end-users (employees & customers) get fast response times for their application transactions no matter where they are physically located - users need interactions at the speed of lightening not the delayed response of a thunder.

The end-users that are most affected are the ones that are in the same facility as the elderly knowledge middle. Because of high bandwidth & almost-zero latency of the LANs they are used to zippy response times for years. In contrast, the latencies across a WAN or the Web could be in the range of tens of milliseconds to hundreds of milliseconds; there could be choke points along the path with low bandwidth.

Now with the Cloud migration & the intervening WAN or Web, they are likely to get stuck with slow responding applications leading to loss of productivity & customer dissatisfaction - unless their company is pre-planned in managing the end-user expectations as an integral part of the migration project.

The main steps involved in addressing the APM issues in the work of a Cloud migration are - identifying & bench-marking critical applications, predicting how they would behave when the migration is completed, & taking remediating actions for those applications that are predicted to have unacceptable response times.

The remediation steps usually involve providing additional bandwidth at the affected locations, using WAN Optimization, incorporating Content Delivery Network (CDN) solutions, converting the application in to a thin-client such as Citrix, or modifying the application to reduce chattiness. In rare cases, such as a mission-critical legacy application, a corporation may pick not to move the application in to the Cloud.

An APM project in the work of a Cloud migration not only requires sophisticated tools from tool vendors such as OPNET but also consultants who can wield these tools with minimal disruption to the current business operations.

With the right APM team as an element of the broader Cloud migration endeavor, performance issues can be addressed head-on. Such forethought can make positive that Cloud migration is a happy for the end-users thus preserving productivity & customer satisfaction. Pricey fixes after migration are avoided & ROI on Cloud migration in-tact.

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