OPNET's New Cloud Readiness Performance Assessments -- Is the application your baby?

By Todd

Yesterday OPNET released this press release: OPNET Introduces Cloud Readiness Performance Assessment Service

According to OPNET's CEO: "Our customers have clearly expressed concerns about the impact of cloud computing on their business applications. OPNET’s new Cloud Readiness Performance Assessment service directly addresses this need by combining our field-proven experience with our suite of monitoring, troubleshooting, and planning solutions. Our service was also developed in response to requests from our partners who require our focused application performance expertise to enhance their broad range of cloud migration and cloud computing services."

For the same reason a parent needs to know his/her children well before choosing the right school for each of them to attend, an enterprise absolutely needs to understand each of its critical applications well before realizing the benefits of cloud computing -- whether through a third party cloud service or an internally hosted private cloud.

All apps are clearly not all moving to "the cloud" tomorrow. But I've observed a very strong trend: more questions about what to move, when, and how.

• Does each application have the right architecture to perform when significant components run on servers in a far-away datacenter?
• What if the enterprise wants to maintain its customer database internally, and leverage a cloud service to support other parts of the application that need to scale dynamically according to spikes in user activity?
• What if the cloud service provider intends to make its own decisions about what parts of the application to run from different datacenters — is that helpful to performance?
• What requirements should the enterprise provide to the service provider, what needs to be co-located, and what are reasonable performance SLAs?
• How do I manage performance following the migration?
  

For my kids, I've tried to leveraged every resource available to me before "outsourcing" their care to the schools they attend… Friends with slightly older kids, for advice; study guides for entrance exams, etc. If the application is your baby, the work you do prior to any kind of cloud migration will likely determine your success.