What is Cloud Computing Performance Evaluation?
Cloud computing performance evaluation is the process by which companies assess how well their cloud computing resources are operating. By migrating to the cloud, you will tap into virtually limitless scaling and flexibility. However, being on the cloud does not guarantee performance. Compared to on-premises systems, you may be surprised at the slowdown in performance once you migrate data-intensive workloads and very large data sets to the cloud. Cloud computing performance evaluation allows you to get a clear picture of which components in your cloud environment are draining performance.
There are many factors used to determine cloud computing performance. IOPS (I/O operations per second) measures how fast your cloud platform can read and write to and from your database. IOPS depends on your actual workload. Latency refers to the lag between executing an operation and getting results. Cloud service providers throttle speeds on the cloud for the benefit of all users, impacting your cloud computing performance. High availability means your applications are always available when your customers and internal users need them most. Finally, capacity is the ability of your cloud platform to provide adequate storage that best suits the needs of your business.
Based on these factors, various tests have been developed to assess the performance of cloud computing resources. For the best outcomes, however, you should first develop a robust strategy before you start testing. There are 5 steps to a solid cloud testing strategy:
1 Define the scope and criteria
2. Develop the test plan and design
3. Configure the test environment
4. Execute the test
5. Monitor, analyze, and fine tune
Tests used to evaluate cloud performance
Once you have laid out your testing strategy, now it’s time to evaluate your computing resources. There are various tests that will let you know how well your cloud computing resources are performing.
Load test
The load test measures application performance under normal and peak conditions. This test is important especially in the retail industry with seasonal fluctuations. You need to take the steps now to ensure that your cloud resources and database will be ready for the holidays.
Stress Test
The stress test subjects your application to extreme conditions outside the bounds of normal operation. What you’re looking for is high reliability, stability, and a low response time when your cloud platform is under pressure.
Browser Test
You want your customers to be able to access your product or service easily no matter what browser they’re using. The browser test ensures that your cloud-supported application works as intended when accessed through different browsers. Your application should be compatible with your customer’s preferred browser.
Latency Test
Once on the cloud, you may be surprised that executing operations takes longer than you’re accustomed to on-premises. The latency test evaluates the speed at which you can move data within your cloud environment, for example, from your cloud data center to your customer-facing application. It also tells you if routine operations are taking longer than expected. You want your customers to have the best user experience when accessing your product or service online. Unexpected slowdowns can lead to frustrated customers, and even abandoning their carts. Turns out customers these days are only willing to wait 3 seconds before hopping off to find what they’re looking for elsewhere.
Targeted Infrastructure Test
APIs, headless transactions, and interactive web services allow you to reach your customer using social media and third-party applications. While these additional tools add unimaginable value to your company’s outreach efforts, they can also slow down performance considerably. The targeted infrastructure test breaks down each component of your cloud infrastructure and any dependencies to test if any of them independently or combined is adversely impacting cloud performance.
Failover Test
We’ve seen cloud service providers pull core cloud services such as IoT. We’ve also seen cloud provider outages that can last from several hours to several days. Your data is what drives your company’s innovation and competitive edge. The failover test confirms the ability of your cloud platform to automatically provide backup resources in the event of a server or system failure. You don’t want to find out the hard way that your company’s data has been compromised, or worst case lost, due to a poor failover system.
Capacity Test
As data continues to grow exponentially every year, safely and accurately storing your data is becoming ever more critical. Your application also needs to be able to support multiple users at the same time. The capacity test measures how many users your cloud infrastructure can handle before performance begins to suffer.
Soak Test
The soak test places a high load on your cloud infrastructure for an extended period. Remember during the pandemic when seemingly everything went online for months on end? Can your cloud system handle another major shift in customer online behavior? The soak test will help to determine how robust your cloud infrastructure really is.
To gain the most value from these tests, the evaluation process should be an ongoing effort. A one-time look into your cloud infrastructure is likely to be skewed. External factors such as seasonal fluctuations in customer traffic can impact performance. It is best to take a holistic view and approach when it comes to cloud computing performance.
Cloud Performance Improvement
The results of these tests may indicate that your cloud performance is not where it needs to be. There are several ways to improve cloud performance.
Firstly, you need to be sure that you’ve selected the right cloud platform that best suits your business needs. Certain cloud service providers specialize in supporting mission-critical workloads. Other providers offer better storage capacities. You need to ensure your cloud platform aligns with the overall goals of your business.
Selecting the right compute instance is also critical. Compute instances within the cloud platform are optimized for certain features such as storage capacity of processing data-intensive workloads.
You can also manage the number of instances running on your cloud platform at the same time. As easy as it is to spin up cloud resources for development or testing, you should also remove them when no longer needed. Managing idle resources will help cloud performance.
Supercharge your cloud performance with Silk
Even after trying these techniques, your cloud performance may still be in a slump.
Turn to Silk!
Silk breaks the link between computing and performance on the cloud. As a result, you can achieve peak performance with over-provisioning cloud resources. The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform sits between your underlying cloud infrastructure and your data and applications.
Silk offers rich, enterprise data services such as zero-footprint snapshots, data reduction, deduplication, and thin provisioning. These features are not available in native cloud alone. Silk’s data services help to minimize the amount of cloud resources you ultimately need, which in turn, helps to keep your cloud costs under control. Your bottom line will thank you.
With Silk, you can migrate your applications to the cloud, without the need to refactor – or rewrite – the underlying code, at the high level of performance you need, at a price that won’t blow your budget. If your ultimate goal is to refactor, you can lift and shift today to start taking advantage of all the cloud has to offer while working to refactor for tomorrow. Silk makes it ideal for large, complex, and mission-critical workloads such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server.
You can see every detail about your cloud infrastructure in-depth and in real time using Silk’s intuitive Flex Dashboard. Idle cloud resources adding to your cloud bill? Use Silk Flex to scale up or scale down your cloud resources instantly using a simple drag and drop.
Silk goes a step further and monitors and manages the performance of all your cloud resources. Silk is cloud-agnostic, meaning you can take Silk with you as your cloud computing needs evolve over time. In this way, Silk ensures that your workload and applications continue to operate at the peak performance that your business needs, and your customers love.
Cloud Computing Performance FAQs
How is cloud computing performance measured?
There are many tests used to determine cloud computing performance. These tests focus on speed, capacity and response times. The load test, stress test and soak test challenge your cloud system under peak and extreme conditions for an extended duration. The browser test ensures customers can access your product or service using any browser of their choice. The latency test looks at response times to determine how fast your cloud resources are responding to requests. The targeted infrastructure test isolates each individual component of your cloud platform to check for performance. The capacity test measures how many users can access your application at the same time. These tests should be performed as part of a testing strategy to achieve the best outcome.
What is performance in cloud computing?
Cloud performance refers to how well your applications, workloads and databases operate in your cloud (or virtual) environment. Traditionally, most cloud computing was confined to on-premises systems. With the advent of cloud computing technology, your data center is no longer on site. Instead, you gain access to cloud computing resources or virtual machines over the internet through an agreement with a cloud service provider. How well you can execute computing functions once you’ve migrated to the cloud defines performance.
There are several factors used to describe performance in cloud computing. IOPS measures how many operations your cloud platform can execute each second. Latency describes the speed at which operations can be executed on your cloud platform. Resource availability tells you if your cloud instances are running as expected. Capacity is the ability of your cloud platform to support multiple users at the same time as well as large amounts of data.
