Application Performance: A Hidden Cost of Cloud Computing

Learn more about Dynatrace

In December 2012, Research in Action (on behalf of Compuware) conducted a survey of 468 CIOs and other senior IT professionals from around the world. The survey determined cloud computing to be the top IT investment priority for 2013. No surprises there, as clearly these professionals are being driven by the promised benefits of greater agility, flexibility and time-to-value.

What is surprising is the fact that 79 percent of these professionals expressed concern over the hidden costs of cloud computing, with poor end-user experience resonating as the biggest management worry.

According to the survey, here are the four leading concerns with cloud migration:

- Performance Bottlenecks: (64%) Respondents believe that cloud resources and e-commerce will experience poor performance due to cloud application bottleneck usage.

- Poor End-User Experience: (64%) End users may end up dissatisfied with the cloud performance due to heavy traffic from application usage.

- Reduced Brand Perception: (51%) Customer loyalty may be greatly reduced due to poor experience and poor cloud performance.

- Loss of Revenue: (44%) Companies may lose revenues as a result of poor performance, reduced availability or slow technical troubleshooting services.

Ironically, these responses come at a time when the cloud is increasingly being used to support mission-critical applications like e-commerce. More than 80 percent of the professionals surveyed are either already using cloud-based e-commerce platforms or are planning to do so within the next 12 months.

It used to be that issues like security and cost dominated the list of cloud concerns. But application performance is increasingly making headway as end users grow more demanding. For the average end user, 0.1 seconds is an instantaneous, acceptable response, similar to what they experience with a Google search. As response times increase, interactions begin to slow and dissatisfaction rises.

The impact of a slowdown can be devastating: Amazon has calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. In addition, Google itself found that slowing search response times by just four-tenths of a second would reduce the number of searches by eight million per day – a sizeable amount.

Inherent cloud attributes like on-demand resource provisioning and scalability are designed to increase confidence in the usability of applications and data hosted in the cloud. But the most common mistake that people often make is interpreting availability guarantees as performance guarantees in a cloud computing environment.

Availability shows that a cloud service provider’s servers are up and running – but that’s about it. Service-level agreements (SLAs) based on availability say nothing about the end-user experience, which can be significantly impacted by the cloud – such as, when an organization’s “neighbor” in the cloud experiences an unexpected spike in traffic.

Yet, despite the business critical nature of many cloud applications, our survey found that 73 percent of companies are still using outdated methods like availability measurements to track and manage application performance.

The fact is that most traditional monitoring tools simply don’t work in the cloud. Effectively monitoring and managing modern cloud-based applications and services requires a new approach based on more granular end-user metrics such as response time and page rendering time. This approach must be based in an understanding of the true end-user interaction “on the other side” of the cloud. It must enable cloud customers to directly measure the performance of their cloud service providers and validate SLAs. With this type of approach, cloud customers can be better assured that application performance issues will not undo the benefits of moving to the cloud.

ABOUT Michael Kopp

Michael Kopp is Technology Strategist, Compuware APM Center of Excellence. He has more than 10 years of experience as an architect and developer. Additionally, Kopp specializes in architecture and performance of Big Data and Cloud environments.

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Application Performance: A Hidden Cost of Cloud Computing

Learn more about Dynatrace

In December 2012, Research in Action (on behalf of Compuware) conducted a survey of 468 CIOs and other senior IT professionals from around the world. The survey determined cloud computing to be the top IT investment priority for 2013. No surprises there, as clearly these professionals are being driven by the promised benefits of greater agility, flexibility and time-to-value.

What is surprising is the fact that 79 percent of these professionals expressed concern over the hidden costs of cloud computing, with poor end-user experience resonating as the biggest management worry.

According to the survey, here are the four leading concerns with cloud migration:

- Performance Bottlenecks: (64%) Respondents believe that cloud resources and e-commerce will experience poor performance due to cloud application bottleneck usage.

- Poor End-User Experience: (64%) End users may end up dissatisfied with the cloud performance due to heavy traffic from application usage.

- Reduced Brand Perception: (51%) Customer loyalty may be greatly reduced due to poor experience and poor cloud performance.

- Loss of Revenue: (44%) Companies may lose revenues as a result of poor performance, reduced availability or slow technical troubleshooting services.

Ironically, these responses come at a time when the cloud is increasingly being used to support mission-critical applications like e-commerce. More than 80 percent of the professionals surveyed are either already using cloud-based e-commerce platforms or are planning to do so within the next 12 months.

It used to be that issues like security and cost dominated the list of cloud concerns. But application performance is increasingly making headway as end users grow more demanding. For the average end user, 0.1 seconds is an instantaneous, acceptable response, similar to what they experience with a Google search. As response times increase, interactions begin to slow and dissatisfaction rises.

The impact of a slowdown can be devastating: Amazon has calculated that a page load slowdown of just one second could cost it $1.6 billion in sales each year. In addition, Google itself found that slowing search response times by just four-tenths of a second would reduce the number of searches by eight million per day – a sizeable amount.

Inherent cloud attributes like on-demand resource provisioning and scalability are designed to increase confidence in the usability of applications and data hosted in the cloud. But the most common mistake that people often make is interpreting availability guarantees as performance guarantees in a cloud computing environment.

Availability shows that a cloud service provider’s servers are up and running – but that’s about it. Service-level agreements (SLAs) based on availability say nothing about the end-user experience, which can be significantly impacted by the cloud – such as, when an organization’s “neighbor” in the cloud experiences an unexpected spike in traffic.

Yet, despite the business critical nature of many cloud applications, our survey found that 73 percent of companies are still using outdated methods like availability measurements to track and manage application performance.

The fact is that most traditional monitoring tools simply don’t work in the cloud. Effectively monitoring and managing modern cloud-based applications and services requires a new approach based on more granular end-user metrics such as response time and page rendering time. This approach must be based in an understanding of the true end-user interaction “on the other side” of the cloud. It must enable cloud customers to directly measure the performance of their cloud service providers and validate SLAs. With this type of approach, cloud customers can be better assured that application performance issues will not undo the benefits of moving to the cloud.

ABOUT Michael Kopp

Michael Kopp is Technology Strategist, Compuware APM Center of Excellence. He has more than 10 years of experience as an architect and developer. Additionally, Kopp specializes in architecture and performance of Big Data and Cloud environments.

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

How AI Agents Are Reshaping DataOps for the Always-On Enterprise

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Nine in Ten Enterprises Plan Cloud Data Repatriation amid Rising Cloud Costs and Data Sovereignty Mandates

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

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Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

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