The New York Times ran a story today on how public cloud performance is being measured. Unlike a private cloud, a key issue when subscribing to a public cloud where you have very little control over the architecture, performance, or how resources are shared between you and hundreds of other users in the same cloud.
They point out that the inner workings of cloud systems are complex because companies have all types of different applications running in the same data center. The interaction of all this software can pose performance challenges and makes the cloud services less responsive than the controlled, fine-tuned data centers that the likes of Amazon.com and Google run for their internal operations.
“Just because you run your application on Amazon’s EC2 or Google’s AppEngine, do not think you will get the same performance as Google.com or Amazon.com,” said Imad Mouline, the Chief Technology Officer at Compuware. “That’s the first idea we need to make sure people get away from.
“The cloud is opaque,” Mr. Mouline added. “If you’re running an application in the cloud, you really don’t know what is going on at the infrastructure level.”
More at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/how-fast-can-a-cloud-run/
Cloud is in early adopter stage but the mainstream will start moving to the cloud as solution for non critical apps and functions over next 2 years.