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By Michael Eggebrecht
With cloud computing getting more than a little mainstream attention, many CIOs are finding themselves under pressure to move some applications and services to the cloud -- or explain why they don’t find it palatable. IT executives need visibility into the cloud to make those decisions with confidence, and a new -- and free -- tool from Compuware aims to help.
Last week at the Cloud Expo Conference in New York, Compuware introduced the beta version of its new community Web portal, CloudSleuth. The main attraction of the site, which is due to officially launch this summer, is an application that allows users to look at performance and availability across multiple providers and geographies.
By interacting with a Flash interface, a user can compare cloud providers’ availability in, say, Boston over the past 30 days -- 100 percent for Amazon EC2 (East), versus 99.98 percent for GoGrid and 99.88 for Microsoft Azure. Or you can see that in Atlanta, for example, the current response time of Google App Engine is 1.267 seconds, while Rackspace’s is 2.881 seconds.
“Performance varies widely from provider to provider and even from the same provider from city to city, even in the U.S.,” said Imad Mouline, CTO of Compuware’s Web performance division, in an interview. The same transaction using the same application and the same provider can take 1 second on the East Coast and 12 seconds on the West Coast. “You really do need to know a bit more about your cloud provider than simply saying they’re out there in the cloud,” noted Mouline. “The physical location of the cloud provider’s data center has a huge impact on the performance ultimately delivered to your end users.”
“Just because the applications are running on Amazon EC2,” he said, “doesn’t mean that they’ll perform as well, or as consistently, as Amazon.com.” Geography is an issue, and availability is not a given, he noted. “Part of what we’re trying to educate people about is to ask the appropriate questions.”
Using the application measurement technology of Gomez, the Web performance company that Compuware bought in November for $295 million, the visualization tool measures and continuously updates the performance of a sample application across a list of providers, which is currently comprised of Amazon, GoGrid, Google, Microsoft, OpSource and RackSpace. Other providers are asking to be included, according to Mouline.
While cloud benchmarking data has been available to Compuware customers, now “everybody can come in and take a look at this data for free and get access to some of these initial resources merely by registering,” said Mouline.
In the next phase of the platform, registered users will be able to plug in URLs for their own applications running in the cloud, giving them some free monitoring. Compuware will provide them with regular reports on their performance, and the company will aggregate the information to deliver greater collective intelligence back to the CloudSleuth community.
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