Tag: cloud performance

Cloudyn Announces Support For Microsoft Azure For Cloud Performance And Cost Analytics

Cloud monitoring leader Cloudyn today announced its support for the Microsoft Azure cloud. Cloudyn’s support of Azure means complements its existing support for Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and OpenStack, thereby rendering it compatible with an even wider range of hybrid cloud infrastructures. Cloudyn specializes in performance management across a variety of cloud infrastructures by means of a unified user interface. In addition to performance management, Cloudyn also delivers cost tracking and optimization services that allow customers to control costs by optimizing resource and infrastructure allocations across different infrastructures and applications. The following screenshot of Cloudyn’s management dashboard illustrates the cost-tracking functionality of the Cloudyn platform:

Cloudyn’s data visualization functionality provides customers with nuanced drill-downs of cost by entity, cost savings opportunities and trend analytics of cost over time. By supporting Microsoft Azure, Cloudyn provides customers with the ability to understand how an Azure deployment alters the cost and performance equation in a hybrid cloud infrastructure that might alternatively include an on-premise OpenStack deployment as well as use of Amazon Web Services. Cloudyn CEO Sharon Wagner commented on the significance of the company’s support for Azure as follows:

We’re thrilled to add support of Microsoft Azure to our set of cloud platforms. Our customers’ interests in Azure adoption have grown rapidly. From the onset, we’ve been committed to helping our customers ease into the multi-cloud model as well as successfully manage it. Now we’ll be able to further help them cut down on cloud spend while avoiding cloud sprawl.

In a phone interview with Cloud Computing Today, Wagner noted that all performance metrics collected from the cloud infrastructures that Cloudyn supports reside on the same table, giving Cloudyn the unique capability to perform cross-cloud performance and cost comparisons. Cloudyn’s ability to deliver rich and nuanced analytics for hybrid cloud deployments renders it a powerful tool for contemporary cloud deployments, the vast majority of which necessarily embrace some combination of private and public cloud environment. Today’s announcement of its support for Azure represents yet another important milestone for Cloudyn, particularly as it seeks to add even more cloud platforms to the list of infrastructures it supports for performance and cost analytics.

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Google Releases Open Source Tool For Cloud Performance Benchmarks And Comparisons

On Wednesday, Google announced the availability of PerfKit Benchmarker, an open source application for benchmarking cloud performance across a variety of cloud infrastructures. PerfKit Benchmarker tackles the notorious difficulty of obtaining metrics about cloud platforms that enable an apples to apple comparison of cloud performance and operational efficacy. PerfKit reports on metrics such as “application throughput, latency, variance and overhead” in addition to data related to the time required to provision resources. Available by means of an Apache License v2, PerfKit Benchmarker is complemented by Perfkit Explorer, a visualization platform that features dashboards and other tools that facilitate rapid comprehension of trends and the business significance of the metrics collected by PerfKit Benchmarker. In a blog post, Google pledged to keep PerfKit current with changes to the evolution of contemporary cloud infrastructures as follows:

PerfKit is a living benchmark framework, designed to evolve as cloud technology changes, always measuring the latest workloads so you can make informed decisions about what’s best for your infrastructure needs. As new design patterns, tools, and providers emerge, we’ll adapt PerfKit to keep it current. It already includes several well-known benchmarks, and covers common cloud workloads that can be executed across multiple cloud providers.

Perfkit currently supports the Google Cloud Platform in addition to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure according to TechCrunch, . All told, the release of Perfkit Benchmarker constitutes a seminal moment for the cloud computing industry given the dearth of data that enable cross-vendor comparisons, metrics compilation and benchmarking. Despite the availability of platforms such as Cloud Harmony, New Relic and Splunk, few tools in the industry facilitate vendor comparisons by leveraging transparent methodologies and metrics-development practices. The key question regarding PerfKit, however, will be the degree to which its measurement practices indirectly play to the strengths of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), although presumably the Google Cloud Platform Performance team would know better than to create a benchmarking tool that serves to cast a positive light on GCP. Moreover, Perfkit was developed in collaboration with the likes of CenturyLink, CloudHarmony, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Red Hat which in and of itself suggests the cloud computing space stands poised to leverage Google’s record of innovation and quality in conjunction with “quarterly discussion on default benchmarks and settings proposed by the community” led by Stanford and MIT. Regardless, Perfkit represents an exciting moment for the technology landscape as cloud computing continues to lean in the direction of interoperability, open standards and APIs between proprietary platforms that facilitate workload sharing and an increasingly open ecosystem for application development and data sharing.

Sponsored Post: The Misadventures of Cloud Computing: When Performance Matters

The following post represents a republication of this Virtustream blog post. The post was authored by the Virtustream editorial team.

When Performance Matters

We know as well as anyone that the cloud solutions market is crowded, and getting more so every day. Nowadays everyone seems to be a cloud provider; everyone has a solution they want to sell you, from legacy hardware providers with “platinum new cloud capabilities” to purists who pressure you to adopt “real” scalable cloud technologies.

But buyer beware: Not all cloud service providers are created equal. Many can generalize solutions or pontificate idealisms, but do they really have the right software and services for your particular enterprise needs? Enterprise cloud users require a much more sophisticated level of performance than a personal user or smaller business. In an enterprise, the data is sensitive, and the stakes are high. It’s vital that a cloud provider that considers themselves “enterprise grade” can guarantee a high level of performance and availability and provides the SLAs to back it up. If its mission critical apps do not consistently run well in the cloud, any other promises just don’t matter.

For more information, check out Virtustream’s LinkedIn page.

Virtustream is the enterprise-class cloud software and service provider trusted by enterprises worldwide to migrate and run their mission-critical applications in the cloud. For enterprises, service providers and government agencies, only Virtustream’s xStream™ cloud management platform (CMP) software and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) meet the security, compliance, performance, efficiency and consumption-based billing requirements of complex production applications in the cloud – whether private, public or hybrid.