Are you planning to deploy Web applications in the cloud? Will their performance be acceptable? What will you do to make sure? There are a lot of good reasons to deploy applications in a cloud environment — but they are all forgotten if your application is slow or has poor availability. Poor performance results in unhappy, lost customers. Traditional data center techniques for monitoring, measuring, and optimizing Web application performance won’t work in the cloud. There are a new set of best practices that you need to learn to optimize the performance of your cloud-based Web applications.

1. Mike Gualtieri - Senior Analyst, Forrester Research Imad Mouline - CTO, Gomez division, Compuware

4. Performance in the cloud is not a slam dunk.

5. Agenda Cloud performance challenges 4 Blazing fast cloud best practices Recommendations

7. Cloud is here to stay because:

8. Achieving blazing fast Web site performance is more challenging

9. Cloud computing can help but it is not a slam dunk Cloud can provide scale on-demand Need more instances? Provision them! But, cloud infrastructure is largely opaque You don’t know what hardware virtual machines are running on You don’t know what the network infrastructures looks like You don’t know with whom you are sharing

10. Enterprises cite flexibility and on demand capacity as top reasons to adopt cloud

11. Security and maturity top list of concerns for IaaS cloud services. What about performance?

12. Cloud computing isn’t an if, it’s a when and how

13. Agenda Cloud performance challenges 4 Blazing fast cloud best practices Recommendations

14. Based upon Forrester’s Blazing Fast Web site performance research Ongoing research stream dedicated to performance, scale, and fault tolerance resulting in published research and best practices Ongoing cloud computing vendor landscape and architecture research Constant Web architecture assessments and recommendations for a broad range of eCommerce, social, and media Web properties. User experience trends and design best practices research

15. 1. Measure, monitor, and respond.

16. Check the performance of your peers at http://benchmarks.gomez.com

17. Browser performance varies widely Source: Gomez sampled 160 million pages across several Websites over a 30 day period from broadband users in the United States

18. Cloud performance varies widely

19. Investigating and resolving incidents is much more challenging in the cloud

20. Design and implement a monitoring system to help answer these three questions

21. Best practices: Measure, monitor, and respond Test and monitor performance from your customer’s perspective. Baseline performance metrics with frequent reporting frequency Know what elements of your infrastructure are affecting performance. Use testing to determine the impact of key changes.

22. 2. Make liberal use of caching. 23 Entire contents © 2009 Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved.

23. The user’s distance from the content matters

24. Achieving blazing fast Web site performance is more challenging

25. Best practices: Make liberal use of caching Design your pages to use the browser cache Add an edge cache Akamai, Contendo, Edgecast, and Limelight are options Cloud providers are also offering edge caching services. E.g. Amazon CloudFront, Microsoft Auzure CDN Deploy to multiple cloud regions/zones Cache application data, sessions, page fragments, and shared application state

26. 3. Architect for elasticity.

27. Source: Animoto (http://animoto.com/)

28. Amazon EC2 easily scaled to handle addition traffic Peak of 5000 instances Launch of Facebook modification Steady state of ~40 instances

29. Best practices: Elastic architecture Implement a cloud bursting strategy Automate elasticity Using elastic caching platform. Isolate functions to scale them separately. Mitigate the risk of remote services.

30. Typical IT Web architecture scales app server tier – not data tier Load balancer Application server Application server Application server Application server Relational database

31. Elastic caching adds a layer to overcome data bottlenecks Load balancer Application server Application server Application server Application server Cache node Cache node Cache node Persistent data store

32. Elastic caching platforms Q2 2010

33. 4. Know cloud providers strengths and weaknesses.

34. Best practices: Know your cloud provider Load and stress test in the cloud Cloud virtual machines won’t be the same as yours Understand the capacity of one instance in the cloud Test the impact of cloud bursting Test cloud services such as storage (e.g. Amazon S3) Test for elasticity How quickly can you provision new instances? Test for performance Include geography tests Continue to monitor the cloud

35. Cloud performance varies widely

36. Agenda Cloud performance challenges 4 Blazing fast cloud best practices Recommendations

37. Best practices for performance in the cloud.

38. First steps to achieving blazing fast performance in the cloud Test performance from your customer’s perspective. Assess your current Web architecture to identify bottlenecks. Implement caching where it will help. Architect for elasticity. Load test your application on your cloud provider. Deploy to cloud. Watch carefully.

39. Thank you Mike Gualtieri +1 617.613.6145 mgualtieri@forrester.com Twitter: mgualtieri www.forrester.com

40. Best Practices For Ensuring Blazing Fast Cloud Applications Imad Mouline - CTO, Gomez, The Web Performance Division of Compuware @imadmouline

41. Web Applications Are Increasingly Composite

42. By The Numbers Number of hosts accessed directly by the browser, per user transaction, averaged across 3,000 companies

43. Web Applications Are Moving To The Cloud Percentage of web app transactions that include at least one object hosted on Amazon EC2

44. 1 – Measure, Monitor, and Respond

45. The Cloud Creates Performance Concerns The Cloud is opaque & shared Loss of visibility and control - traditional tools don’t apply Others can affect my performance

46. The Web Application Delivery Chain My users 3rd Party/Cloud Services Browsers and devices Local ISP Load Balancers Web Servers Other users Mobile Components Solution = “Outside-in” customer point of view App Servers Cloud Internet Other users MajorISP DB Servers Mobile Carrier Storage Mainframe Other users Network Content DeliveryNetworks The Cloud Is Opaque: How do you know if your application is really performing?

48. 2 – Make Liberal Use of Caching

49. Web App Delivery Chain – Bottlenecks Revisited Natural bottlenecks are also optimization opportunities Potential bottlenecks Instance

50. “Make Liberal Use Of Caching” Validate Caching at the SERVER Long First Byte times a potential server-side caching opportunity

51. Geographic Latency – Europe-based Response time for sample transaction of reference application hosted on Amazon EC2 Europe West (Dublin), as measured from major European cities

52. Geographic Latency – US-based Response time for sample transaction of reference application hosted on Amazon EC2 US East (Virginia), as measured from major US cities

53. “Make Liberal Use Of Caching” - Validate Caching at the EDGE

54. “Make Liberal Use Of Caching” - Validate Caching at the BROWSER Internet Explorer 8.x Internet Explorer 7.x Safari 4.x Chrome Firefox 3.x

55. 3 – Architect For Elasticity

56. “Architect For Elasticity” Cloud makes it easier to use elastic architecture strategies Elasticity can come at a high expense Make sure to balance performance and cost Potential bottlenecks Instance

57. The Cloud Offers Unique Opportunities For Optimization Domain sharding is a common performance optimization In traditional hosting environment, it came at a price The Cloud, with proper planning, can provide sharding for free Potential bottleneck Bucket 1 Bucket 2

58. The Cloud Offers Unique Opportunities For Optimization Better performance, for little work, at no extra cost?

59. The Cloud Is Prepared For The Unknown Faced with constraints anywhere upstream from the browser, the cloud offers unique opportunities to expand capacity. Potential bottleneck Instance @ capacity Instance Dynamically provisioned

60. The Cloud Helps You Prepare For The Unknown

61. Impact Of Optimization Across Browsers & Mobile Devices Yesterday’s optimizations must be constantly revalidated Sharding fails to show benefit on modern browser Sharding shows a substantial performance hit on mobile devices such as the iPad

62. 4 – Know the Performance of Your Cloud Provider

63. “Know Your Cloud Provider” - Performance Average response time of reference app transaction across various Cloud providers, measured from several global locations

64. “Know Your Cloud Provider” – Availability Aggregate average availability of reference app on Opsource, Amazon EC2 US East, Amazon S3, GoGrid & Google AppEngine measured from global backbone locations

65. Best Practice: Define your goals and build a plan Align goals across your organization Why are we moving to the cloud? Common goals include: Additional Capacity – How much capacity do we need during normal and peak times? Improved End-User Experience – What performance goals are we trying to deliver against? Greater Elasticity – How quickly can the provider we select ramp up to meet our needs? Flexible Bursting – How fast do we need to be able to access additional capacity? If only there was a button to push!

66. Best Practice: Performance Testing Cloud Capabilities Evaluate vendors based on your goals… Capacity Test vendors to 15-20% past estimated capacity goals Elasticity Baseline end-user performance before & after testing Test during pre-deployment and in production Ramp elasticity testing to peak levels Burstability Isolate the cloud elements from other infrastructure to test Test the “failover process”

67. Mike Gualtieri - Senior Analyst, Forrester Research Imad Mouline - CTO, Gomez division, Compuware