Using cloud means placing your applications into an environment where you don’t actually have much control over the environments. You use shared servers and a shared network, both of which impact the performance you experience. You have limited visibility into the utilization and other issues that affect how your resources behave. In this situation, what can you do to make sure your applications deliver the performance you need?

1. Use high performance instances

One solution to the performance issue is to use the highest performance instances your cloud vendor offers. This will give you more raw power, and likely fewer competitors for the underlying physical resources. Unfortunately, this approach also means likely paying more than you need to to get acceptable performance.

2. Use scalable applications and load balance

With applications that scale horizontally, you can deploy the application on multiple smaller instances and use load balancing to make sure none of the servers are overloaded.

3. Pay attention to your network

Using public internet to access your cloud means you have no control over the path or performance between your office and the cloud site. Using direct connections eliminates the shared network and makes the connection to the cloud faster as well as offering better privacy.

4. Use private cloud

Private cloud means building and managing your own cloud inside your data center. As a result, you gain the visibility and control you surrender to public cloud. It’s a trade-off, though; you give up some of the ease of use and reduced costs that you get in public cloud.

5. Use monitoring tools to determine where problems are occurring

It’s hard to fix a performance problem when you can’t tell whether it’s occurring due to the application, the server, or the network. Cloud providers offer monitoring tools that give you a limited view of what’s happening in the cloud. To fully understand the performance end users experience, you need to use tools that monitor performance between the user’s desktop or smartphone and the cloud. Once you have data that spans the distance and offers a transactional view of performance, you can take steps to improve your network, update your cloud configuration, or press the cloud provider to meet the performance guaranteed in their service level agreements.

6. Keep some applications out of the cloud

While data security concerns are one reason to keep certain applications on-site, an application’s design is another factor. Applications that are not designed to scale, that have a large number of tiers, and that require a lot of communication between front and back end may not be able to deliver effective performance in the cloud.

Are you finding it challenging to get the application performance you need in the cloud? Prescient Solutions is a Microsoft Partner with expertise working with Microsoft Azure. Our team of experts helps Chicago-area businesses, organizations, and government agencies get the best out of their IT solutions in the data center and in the cloud. Contact us to start solving your cloud performance challenges.

Additional Cloud Resources

5 Steps to Better Security in Your Hybrid Cloud

The Key Actions to Take Before, During, and After Your Cloud Migration

Use Automation to Simplify Your Cloud Management