How to manage cloud service performance

Cloud services are a common service today, and many entrepreneurs are using it. However, when an enterprise migrates a core IT system to a private cloud or a public cloud network, it does not mean that it ends. Today, there is a different set of technical issues to deal with, that is, how to manage the cloud to ensure that the investment of the enterprise is rewarded with the expected efficiency and return on investment.

this April, Amazon EC2 (Flexible computing cloud) A service interruption incident occurred, after which the cloud management and cloud monitoring were valued by many enterprises. The accident, let it field see what happens when the cloud environment encounters a failure, very good to other companies big needle, many companies in the business with the fault of the network interruption. Recently, there have been some serious cloud interruption incidents.

According to the above, recently,IDC analyst Mary Johnston Turner Survey of 250 user companies that the can get the performance of enterprise purchase is one of the big traps of public cloud. Service-level protocol performance guarantees rank second in importance, second only to the specific needs of the application itself.

The company is very concerned about performance, Turner said. One reason why businesses are so interested in private cloud is because it leaders are responsible for getting good performance for their users. They are not prepared to give these huge responsibilities to third party cloud manufacturers.

When it comes to cloud computing, management software is no longer an afterthought; it must be part of the implementation, and every time you make a decision you have to think about how to best integrate cloud capabilities into your enterprise's IT architecture.

Software as a service (SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are two types of cloud commitment that offer tremendous opportunities for enterprise IT tasks. If IT pros are ahead of the trend, they really need to learn how to talk like experts when it comes to SaaS and IaaS issues.

When it comes to cloud computing contracts, knowledge is the key and reading is the foundation.

It's not just a cloud issue, she adds, but a problem that arises from the complexity of composite applications. Next, these composite applications will be introduced into the cloud environment.

This is a huge challenge, Turner said. Users need to invest in application performance management products made for composite applications and virtualized environments. Now this is a complete category of products.

The idea is to be able to independently monitor the performance of the application in the network and performance in the cloud, and then be able to measure where the application has reached the user's performance requirements, inside or outside the firewall.

IGN.com is one of the world's largest video game sites. For David Ting, the company's vice-president for engineering, it is important to monitor the cloud performance of his company because the survival of the business depends on the ability to connect 2.54 million of its users to the site's ad-supported online games.

"For us, performance is money, because viewing pages is the key," Ting said. We are supported by advertising, every time we watch the count of the page can help our company bring revenue. This is something that we pay close attention to. ”

To make it work, the ING Entertainment Department of media giant News Corp uses the new Relic Company's performance monitoring tool in San Francisco to continuously observe its Web site's performance in the cloud. We rely mainly on this tool, Ting said. For us, this is the response time of the IGN Web site and the number of processing times per second.

Extended tracking performance with cloud deployment

IGN.com has been using the new Relic tool for about 18 months. It first migrates unproductive development and other applications into the cloud to see how they work. Now, IGN.com is putting new projects on the cloud server, including a social media stack, so that the company can strengthen applications and upgrade them as needed. In addition, one application planned for deployment in this cloud is the disaster recovery infrastructure for this network.

Ting, referring to the company's IT system, said the system would eventually migrate to the cloud. We must ensure the stability of our performance when we are going to do it in the future. We're looking at this thing.

New Relic Tool Monitoring can provide performance metrics that IGN can not provide with other tools, Ting said. These old tools are good for physical machine monitoring, but they can't be monitored at all without the engineering team doing a lot of work.

By looking at the new Relic management tools, IT staff was able to start more cloud-based servers, close underperforming application instances, and then add new instances as needed to maintain user response time. With the previous tools, the Ting team can only understand uptime and no response time.

Ting explains that the New relic provides great visibility for response times. This allows IT staff to take action even when the server is running. For example, we found that a memcached (high-performance distributed Memory Object caching system) server performs a much worse performance than the other servers in this pool. Before further investigation, we found that a memory module was faulted. In the Nagios (an open-source, free network monitoring tool) environment, that server runs until it freezes.

IGN.com is currently using Amazon's EC2 service to enter the cloud domain.

With the new Relic tool, IGN.com is able to observe all aspects of this three-tier architecture, from its foreground to its database to its API (Application programming Interface) layer. This management tool helps ensure that user response times are optimized and do not reach peak levels.

"The amount of data and the accuracy of the data are very important." This is the starting point for us to look at metrics and to use it to make intelligent business decisions. "Ting said.

In addition to migrating its IT infrastructure, IGN.com has been exploring many sites in more than 100 web sites that use the cloud to host it to improve performance and uptime. The main sites include IGN.com, AskMen.com, gamespy.com, fileplanet.com, teamxbox.com and gamestats.com.

"So far, the tests have been positive. We've moved some of the infrastructure components to the cloud. The matter is now in the experimental stage. We're checking performance. "Ting said.