Are you investing in continuous performance testing and continuous performance monitoring?
We know that organisations are moving towards cloud due to its many benefits.
In cloud, scalability and availability can be achieved easily. However, it is not free. Organisations need to pay for that.
Applications don’t run fast in the cloud. So, the question is how will organisations ensure that their application will perform as expected after deploying the application in the cloud? Continuous performance testing & continuous performance monitoring ensure your application’s performance. Applications deployed in the cloud will run faster only after proper performance engineering. It also saves cloud cost in the long run.
Continuous performance testing & continuous monitoring for all types of applications – mandatory:
If we look closely, the overall performance testing and performance monitoring process remains the same for an application no matter whether it is deployed in cloud or not. Though cloud has many benefits, however for cloud-based applications, performance monitoring is not straight forward. In cloud, it is easy to scale an application though that comes with a cost. This also adds difficulties for optimising applications or improving an application’s performance in cloud. Configuring the cloud resources appropriately in the case of cloud deployed applications and getting the benefits of elastic saves on cost. Overall we must improve our application’s performance no matter whether deploying to cloud or not by conducting continuous performance testing & continuous monitoring.
Think about performance before deploying to cloud:
Poor performing applications don’t run fast in the cloud. We need to ensure that we are deploying the application in cloud after conducting proper performance engineering. This will make scaling easier, ensure optimum resource utilisation and provide overall cost saving. If not, the benefits of cloud will not be visible. Also, poor performance makes the end-user dissatisfied. End-users can leave your business and move to a competitor business due to poor application performance. So, the objective is to be proactive with proper performance testing and continuous monitoring tools to identify and fix the application performance issues well in advance before it affects end-users. This applies to both cloud and non-cloud applications.
Only after establishing the performance of an application (by continuous performance testing) and setting up continuous application monitoring, organisations can promote the application to the cloud. In a nutshell, organisations must have proper visibility into application performance by continuous application monitoring before moving to cloud.
Performance Testing & Monitoring for Cloud based applications – not an afterthought:
Normally, if an application’s performance looks bad in cloud, we usually think it is because of the cloud machine sizing or configurations or noisy neighbour effect. However, it can be due to the application’s performance itself. When the application’s performance doesn’t look promising, even after trying to add more cloud resources or changing the configurations, then we try to look at the application’s actual performance. During this stage, we conduct several rounds of performance testing with performance monitoring to establish the current performance and improve the overall performance to meet the performance SLAs (service level agreements). This can be costly as we are only thinking about performance at the end. Performance Testing and monitoring for cloud-based applications should not be an afterthought process. Rather, it should be one of the important criteria before moving to cloud.
Cloud Monitoring with Application Performance Monitoring- Optimized Application Performance with minimize hardware cost:
Once deployed the application is in the cloud, cloud monitoring is required in addition to continuous application performance monitoring. Cloud monitoring helps us to see the underlying cloud infrastructure and its usage. It should also support auto-scaling (both scaling up & down) of the application. Both, cloud monitoring and continuous application performance monitoring provides detailed metrics to improve application performance and achieve optimal utilisation with minimizing hardware cost.
Conclusion
Continuous performance testing & continuous performance monitoring ensure application’s performance. Knowing application’s actual performance and confirming the performance SLAs are met before deploying the application into cloud will also ensure that the applications will be running fast in cloud. Cloud monitoring is required with continuous application performance monitoring after application is deployed in cloud to ensure application performance.
Check out our library of webinars and eBooks from testing experts.
