Synthetic Monitoring
These days, the cloud is considered a panacea for nearly every kind of business technology concern – its promise of scalability, flexibility and agility drive mass adoption.
“Let’s move it to the cloud” is a phrase any IT or Operations Manager has probably heard a thousand times. People assume that when an application is migrated to a cloud environment, it will magically operate as if it were designed and built in that environment, easily scaling up to meet the demands of a fast-paced, growing business.
The Hard Truth: Applications Don’t Always Scale Well
The fact is, an application cannot always utilize this new environment as it should; cloud infrastructure scalability doesn’t automatically eliminate application performance problems. Applications cannot always scale up, even when running on scalable cloud infrastructures. This becomes crystal clear when applications which performed adequately in traditional environments “break” when subjected to higher loads and dynamic scalability in the cloud.
You’ve spent all this time touting the cloud’s praises, finally convincing your boss to make the big move, and now it breaks? Yikes!
If you’re not prepared for the move, you risk overloading your servers and knocking down your applications when you need them most.
How then can we proactively migrate to the cloud without causing strain on application performance and business processes?
Cloud Performance Testing
Load testing and monitoring services are your best line of defense against overloading your cloud applications.
A load testing service will help you to ensure your infrastructure is able to handle the system demands on your cloud applications. Cloud performance testing is necessary to ensure that cloud infrastructure elasticity is matched with applications that scale well.
While a user may start to experience longer load times and slower performance when an application is being overloaded, they’ll probably just chalk the problem up to a slow or overloaded Internet connection and not a server issue. Slow performance annoys the user in the short-term, but it means less work is getting done in the long term. Load tests periodically test your cloud applications for performance issues from servers all over the country or world, pinpointing performance-draining problems and providing actionable insight for effective troubleshooting.
Load Testing and Performance Monitoring Take the Guesswork out of Cloud Performance Troubleshooting
If you have a user complaining “the app is slow,” that statement really doesn’t help your development staff much in answering why the service is slow and how to fix it.
A load testing service’s multi-location approach can help identify region-related Internet connectivity problems, as well as how much usage your existing infrastructure can take before it runs into obstacles. If you’re growing to the point that you need more server power, that’s a great thing: you don’t want to miss out on that growth with a stalled service.
Load testing and monitoring services effectively help identify performance bottlenecks and inefficient application coding that may be causing the server to do more work than it needs to.
An efficiency-tweaked web application can accomplish more using fewer server resources, which can, in turn, lower your server demands and save you money. On the other side, performance testing can also help determine if you’re paying for more server power than you actually need.
While load testing services may seem like another cost in the already expensive cloud migration process, they are an investment in the long run, and will likely save you many headaches down the road.