On Quality

A recent Booz Allen economic study highlights two key drivers of cost savings in a cloud environment: the speed at which you migrate your applications to the cloud and the extent to which you can reduce the internally-managed infrastructure supporting these migrated applications. The faster the better; the greater the reduction of internally-managed infrastructure the better.

But even before you get to the speed of migration, there’s a more fundamental question to answer: Which applications are suitable for migration to the cloud? Answering this question will depend on the specifics of your application portfolio and your (and your business’) appetite for risk. In particular, you’ll have to find the right balance between cost reduction and performance and security issues.

Here is how CAST’s quality metrics can inform your migration plan.

A CAST analysis can determine which applications are ready for cloud migration and vet the performance of those applications before you put it on the cloud. Once on the cloud, CAST enables you to painlessly monitor your application’s performance to ensure you are not wasting your money.

a. Understand how well the application will perform, measure robustness, performance, and security. Some of these factors can be exacerbated in a cloud environment; best to know that before you migrate. Also keep in mind that cloud hosts can kick you off the cloud if they determine that your application puts others on the cloud at risk.

b. In measuring quality, CAST can also quickly highlight and measure the drivers of application costs. Some of these cost drivers remain whether you’re on the cloud or not, so it’s important to know about them from the start.

c. If cloud is a cost cutting measure, use CAST metrics to make sure you’re not burning more MIPS, using more memory, and transferring more data than you should.

Use application quality information to make the best migration decision.

Yesterday CAST  hosted a breakfast for IT leaders in government agencies – one of the themes was moving applications to the Cloud.  I was surprised (and relieved) to see so many agencies represented – FEMA, DHS, SEC, NASA, and the Defense Intelligence Agency just to name a few. 

Based on yesterday’s conversation and the questions from the audience, I’m even more convinced this is something companies are going to keep asking us about.  The considerations around reliability, security and maintainability don’t change when you move applications to the Cloud – if anything they become more serious. 

I’m certain this is going to be a theme for 2010 and luckily for me, CAST belongs in this conversation.

Our customers will need guidance on which applications make sense to move and which don’t – and how to make sure those applications they migrate to the Cloud don’t pose risks or compromise performance. 

To hear more about our thoughts on cloud, see Jitendra’s knowledgeable and clever post, ‘Cloud – is that something you might be interested in?’

If you’re interested in the presentations from yesterday, comment and I’ll send them to you.  Because it was so popular we might record a web session, but for the private sector. Stay tuned!

Recently, an Australian team studied the performance of the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Clouds. The results reminded me of Bob on Entourage.

The results are not surprising. The on-demand cloud services from these companies “suffer from regular performance and availability issues.”

Now, not to make too much of this — we already know that blazing performance on the cloud is neither a promise these vendors make nor an economic reality. After all, if you want cheap AND scalable, something’s got to give.

But you can be prepared.

If you could precisely measure the performance and availability of an application on the cloud, would that be something you might be interested in?

If you could do this before you migrated to the cloud, would this be something you might be interested in?

If you’re a vendor of Cloud services, would you be interested in tracking not just usage, but quality of service?

Well, you can. In what follows I’ll show you exactly when and what to measure for optimal migration.

I’d be glad to tell you more – just email me. Or go here.

Now Bob might be a parody of himself, but he really gets to the core of what matters. In software, it’s the only thing that matters in the end is the product, the stuff, aka the code. It’s so difficult to measure that people get frustrated.

But it’s something you should be interested in.