Seeing Clearly, Acting Appropriately: App Developers, IT Professionals Gain Confidence in Cloud Deployments with ADN

In today’s dynamic cloud marketplace, application developers and IT professionals are racing to keep up with competitive demands. One of their constant concerns is ensuring that applications work properly in the cloud environment. Outages and unpredictable failures or loads elevate the risks of underperformance or unavailability. Time and money are wasted on amateurish hit-or-miss trials to determine if the problems are caused by the cloud platform, bandwidth limitations, the application tiers or the infrastructure services themselves.

There are ways to gain clearer visibility into availability, reliability, configuration and performance. New tools, implementing the application defined networking (ADN) concept available on the market are giving app developers and IT professionals greater confidence in their cloud deployments by providing more automation and a systematic approach to gathering data. ADN allows applications to directly control and adapt the networking environment, so that their delivery and performance across public and private cloud networks are optimized without compromising portability or security. With these capabilities, they are able to gather comprehensive intelligence and quickly make the necessary and appropriate changes to avoid cascading effects.

The Challenge of the Cloud

There’s no denying that cloud adoption is here to stay, and it’s growing exponentially. IDC cloud research shows that worldwide revenue from public IT cloud services grew at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.6 percent, four times greater than the projected growth (6.7 percent) for the worldwide IT market as a whole.

The fast-moving nature of the cloud market has created a number of challenges that severely stress both application developers and IT professionals. For the developers, fierce competition requires them to quickly deploy updates to their apps and add new features, often without time to fully test how these changes impact performance, usability or the way the app interacts with the network and other related applications. And when problems do occur, developers are forced to stop what they’re doing to troubleshoot, trying almost blindly to find the weakest links.

IT professionals are similarly stressed because they are stretched between their core tactical duties of ensuring that their companies’ existing IT solutions are running smoothly and having the time to evaluate new apps that are being introduced to their users. With so little time, IT professionals fall into the same trap as developers – they deploy new apps, but have little time to test, so there are often performance problems they need to address. But they have limited visibility into the real-time performance of their apps, making it difficult to find where problems reside so they quickly and effectively address the issues.

In order to ensure that apps can run smoothly, it is common for app developers and IT professionals to overprovision their resources. They also instrument the application, the systems and potentially the network to accumulate more data in hopes that will provide the clues they need to make the necessary changes. But throwing more money, servers and people at the problem, or collecting more raw data and getting more alerts is painful and rarely resolves the issues efficiently.

Delivering Greater Visibility and Automation

With the advent of ADN, app developers and IT professionals can address these problems head on, without spending inordinate amounts of money and time for temporary fixes. A software solution that constitutes an intermediate control layer, between the infrastructure and the application, ADN captures and transmits information about an application’s communication needs, as well as network performance and capabilities. By giving them greater visibility into the various heterogeneous infrastructure components that impact application performance, ADN makes it easier for developers and IT professionals to quickly troubleshoot the running application when problems arise. ADN also can help to better develop scalable and distributed apps, and provision and test their execution infrastructure as well, eliminating performance problems from the start.

As part of ADN's adoption, there are specialized tools now on the market that can simplify the management of on-demand infrastructure by providing a better view of the cloud deployment across different geographic regions – delivering a visual map rather than raw data and spreadsheets that are commonly offered by cloud providers. One such tool that provides greater visibility into Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud infrastructure is CloudWeaver Discovery. A free cloud mapping and inventory documentation tool, it enables developers and IT professionals to automatically visualize and document the networking and all aspects of their AWS infrastructure and services, showing in real-time graphical topology maps and reports that enable them to better inventory and manage their cloud components.

The ADN visualization tools, combining cloud structure and usage maps, can provide app developers and IT professionals with the visibility they need – showing the underlying network topology, capacity, usage and points of vulnerability associated with a cloud deployment. This information, presented in an easy-to-understand, visual manner, does not require users to be network experts to anticipate network congestions, fix bottlenecks or determine the cause of latency. These solutions instead provide an intuitive way to help app developers and IT professionals maximize performance and utilization of resources, based on flow patterns of the apps, which ultimately minimizes overprovisioning and the costs related to that temporary fix.

With more knowledge about all the components being used in cloud environments provided by ADN visualization tools, app developers and IT professionals can have confidence that their deployments will be fraught with far fewer problems, cost less and adhere to service level agreements, resulting in greater end user satisfaction with the app and more time for them to focus on driving innovation to meet their companies’ core missions.

Pascale Vicat-Blanc is founder and CEO of Lyatiss Inc., a SaaS (News - Alert) solution provider for application defined networking (ADN) solutions. She has more than 20 years of experience on network and cloud computing technologies, having served as research director at INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science), CIO of a Grid 5000 Data Center, team leader at INRIA-Bell Labs (News - Alert) and a project manager with the CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). Vicat-Blanc earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Lyon.