Cloud Computing and Web Application Performance: The Risks of Adopting The Cloud

W H I T E PA P E R
Cloud Computing and Web Application Performance:
The Risks of Adopting The Cloud
www.gomez.comExecutive SummaryAny business considering cloud computing to support its customer-facing Web applications must look beyond the cloud's cost savings and scalability and evaluate how cloud adoption will impact the end-user experience. This whitepaper addresses the Web experience challenges companies must address when adopting the cloud. It offers perspective and best practices to achieve world- class Web performance and assist in the evaluation of cloud providers and development of cloud performance SLAs.Web performance, the response time or speed at which services are delivered to an end-user, is a critical metric for any organization since today's end-users, whether business or consumer, expect ever-increasing speed and complex, media-rich web applications.
Few cloud providers currently offer performance metrics from the end-user perspective, even fewer offer service level agreements based on Web performance.
So while your cloud service control panel might indicate full availability, this is no guarantee your customers are having a quality Web experience. Tests conducted by Gomez to evaluate the performance of several major cloud services reveal certain performance gaps which best-in-class businesses would find unacceptable: 1. Cloud providers exhibited a wide variation in Website performance across geography, with some major cities delivering end-user response times as much as 10 times slower than others.2. Elasticity, the ability of the cloud to scale up quickly, may not ramp at speeds that keep up with audience requests.3. Numerous cloud services exhibited performance problems (e.g. slow and missing content and functionality) at the edge of the Internet - where your customers live - which would have an impact a visitor behavior and conversions.To ensure your Website visitors are consistently getting a quality experience, it is vital to regularly test and monitor your cloud-based Web applications from your users' perspective: from the outside-in. This is due to the inherent lack of control over cloud services, the absence of SLAs to guarantee performance levels, and the lack of detailed monitoring of the cloud's implicit or explicit benefits. Best-in-class companies take this outside-in approach to performance monitoring. They focus on the end-user, and also obtain SLA guarantees from cloud providers. The result: reaping the cloud's benefits while also providing a superior Web experience for their customers.
W H I T E PA P E R - C L O U D C O M P U T I N G A N D W E B A P P L I C AT I O N P E R F O R M A N C E : T H E R I S K S O F A D O P T I N G T H E C L O U D 2The Cloud and Today's Web Experience ChallengesWikipedia Definition: Cloud computing Cloud computing has moved beyond the hype and into the mainstream, now gaining traction with is a style of computing in which dynamically enterprise customers after initial adoption by SMBs. It's hard to ignore the benefits: pay-per-use billing, scalable and often virtualized resources are scalability, flexibility, burstable capacity, agility, and hopefully fewer headaches for your IT team. Yet provided as a service over the Internet. Users while the word itself - cloud - describes a model offering complex Web infrastructures as turnkey need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or services, it also implies a lack of control which can be unnerving for a CIO or IT administrator. control over the technology infrastructure in the "cloud" that supports them. Like any disruptive technology in its early stages, cloud computing is an evolving landscape. Providers are responding to customers' needs with varying degrees of success, resulting in movements such as the Cloud Computing Bill of Rights, which attempts to bring standards and principles to this fast-Gomez Definition: moving industry and answer initial concerns about security and portability. Web application delivery chain One of the most important concerns for many Web businesses is how cloud adoption will impact Web and mobile applications are delivered their customers, the end-user. This raises two critical questions for technology executives: to your users via a complex set of services called the Web application delivery chain. . How will adopting the cloud impact my end-users' Web experience? This complex c... [download for more]