Chapter 8. Practical considerations
This chapter covers
- Choosing a cloud provider
- Public cloud providers and SLAs
- Measuring cloud operations
It’s been one week since you launched the new corporate collaborative portal on the cloud to great fanfare. You’re still basking in the accolades of your colleagues as you log in to the application to see the CTO’s latest blog posting on the wonders of cloud computing, only to find out that your new site is unreachable. It must be a glitch, you think, trying again. Same result. Frantically, you try other sites within the intranet. You can reach the cafeteria menu application without any problem. Next, you try reaching other sites on the internet, such as yahoo.com—again, success. You try your portal once more. Still unavailable. You’re starting to get that sinking feeling, as you imagine going from hero to goat in the short span of a week. But it’s your lucky day. The gods of IT look down mercifully on you, and lo and behold, 10 minutes later the portal is back online. What happened, and how did the situation resolve itself?
Applications running in your corporate data center are typically monitored and managed using network management-systems software. How can you gain similar insight into the operation of an application running in the cloud?