Cloud Corner

Mobile Apps Will Require Application Performance Management 2.0

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Nov 09, 2011. Leave a Comment

Application Performance Management (APM) 1.0 was defined years ago by Gartner as application performance monitoring for client server applications. Players such as CA, Wily, IBM, HP and BMC dominated the landscape, which was characterized by delivering real-time “status” of how a customer’s infrastructure was running in production. Then, as new web applications started appearing around 2001, a new set of players began to emerge. These included Gomez and Keynote, which added monitors around the end-user experience. Then recently, another breed of APM vendors came along focusing on monitoring customer transactions. These vendors include OpTier, AppDynamics and New Relic. In general, companies have two or three vendors’ monitors tracking their production status. Is this true management?

Today’s customers are looking for the next generation of Application Performance Management tools, tools specifically built for mobile applications and which track all aspects of performance. We’ll call this Application Performance Management 2.0.

There are two components of APM 2.0. The first is the delivery of a single real-time view of all performance metrics on the same timeline. This enables companies to drill into performance data much deeper/faster because it’s all located in the same place thus giving these companies, in effect, a multi-dimensional view of their performance data. Why is this so? Performance issues occur from a cascade of events eventually leading to latency or even a crash. Multi-dimensional views get to the problems quicker.

The second component of APM 2.0 is the need to add simulation to their platform. Today, companies can only react to a fire drill. Instead, companies want to prevent this fire drill from occurring in the first place. To do this requires the ability to simulate hundreds of different scenarios, which include massive loads, unique devices and many other variables.

Preventive maintenance through simulation will be the key to 2012 APM 2.0 tools for almost every mobile app builder.

 

Agility. At what cost?

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Nov 03, 2011. Leave a Comment

For the past several years those of us in tech have been in a race to reach a growing global marketplace of consumers newly armed with mobile devices.

Mobile apps are different from the previous generation of apps in how they are built (assembled), by the type of dynamic content they contain (video, etc.) and by the speed in which change occurs. So much so that a new buzzword now defines their nature: Agile. In this instance Agile means the ability to refresh an application a couple times a day. To do this, most companies have had to rethink their current development processes which, in many cases, were structured around monthly release schedules.

As the race to meet the growing mobile market ramped up, new platforms such as cloud computing emerged to help deliver agility in the deployment process. Then new development languages (Ruby) and technologies (Ajax, HTML5) arrived, adding agility to the development cycle. The race was on, and business agility became more and more of a daily reality. The problem: At what price was agility being achieved?

Behind the scenes, developers began to believe that their new mobile apps would never fail if they had access to unlimited and affordable compute power to run them, as was promised by cloud computing. So they stopped testing these apps in a rush to bring new features live. For many, this single shift of eliminating the test process has destroyed all the good that the advancements in cloud computing and new Agile development technologies had delivered.

In ecommerce, though, a website has to work because the consumer is only couple clicks away from the competition. When these sites began to fail, consumers went elsewhere and they may never come back.

Great progress has been made in delivering corporate agility. However, as important as agility is, performance trumps agility on consumer-facing web sites every time.

 

Mobile. Mobile. Mobile.

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Oct 18, 2011. Leave a Comment

It will come as no surprise to any of you that after years of projected success, the worldwide mobile app market is actually beginning to reach expectations.

With the emergence of a whole new suite of smart devices and development and deployment platforms, everyone is racing to reach consumers through mobile apps. This is welcome news for those of us in the mobile space and especially for players patiently waiting for the market to take off.

Keynote Systems has been pushing mobile monitoring since 1999 with only marginal success. DeviceAnywhere, meanwhile, built a very expensive physical network of global devices and providers for the purposes of monitoring mobile apps in 2003 and has been treading water waiting for the mobile app market to emerge. Well, the market is now cooking; good for both of these companies for holding on during the tough times. The question is, at what price did they pay by doing so?

Last week they announced a merger. Why now, just as the market is beginning to evolve? For Keynote, the merger makes the most sense because its approach of “emulating” mobile devices has come under fire from more than one source. By acquiring DA it will improve its approach significantly. However, is this enough?

Some think that DA’s own technology has some very real limitations.  Mobile monitoring and testing just has not been able to keep up with either the technical advancements in dynamic content or with the agility in which these new technologies are being applied today … and subsequently the performance of mobile apps has been terrible.

I applaud the tenacity of these two great companies for persevering over all these years as the mobile markets matured.  That said, I predict that the coming years will see a real renaissance in the mobile app test market that will ultimately change this game once again, thus thrusting a whole new generation of mobile test and monitor vendors into the forefront.  Should be exciting times for everyone building mobile apps today.  For Mobile Dev/Ops/Test market … “These Times, They are a-Changin!”

 

I’m Back!

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Oct 12, 2011. Leave a Comment

What does a Cloud CEO do for a summer vacation?

It’s been a while. According to my new editor-in-chief, Leslie, I have not blogged since mid-summer. I do tweet regularly, though, at @lounibos. The fact that she’s not too happy about means it’s time for us to catch up.

What’s been keeping me away from blogging? Was it the lure of the beach? Nope! Was it my love of baseball? Nope! It was what it always seems to be for fast-growing Cloud startups: fund raising! Yep, I spent the summer rummaging around the Venture “Forest” that we call The Silicon Valley.

However, this time was very different as I had not planned to forage for cash until the spring, when fresh capital begins to bloom. This time we got started under the heat of the summer sun because, unexpectedly, a private VC decided to go rogue and preemptively offer us capital in which to grow. That’s how it all began.

I’ll tell you the rest of the story and more about our growth in time. And so here we are, 90 days later, and I’m emerging from the forest realizing that the summer has passed and that it’s time to update my blog.

That’s the short version of how I spent my summer vacation, along with the general business of talking to our customers, prospects and employees about their challenges and how we can solve them.

Leslie has made me promise not to disappear again!

 

It’s Time to End Web 2.0’s ‘Dirty Little Secret’

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jul 18, 2011. Leave a Comment

75% of All Web & Mobile Apps Go Live Without Ever Being Scale Tested

So why is it that so many web and mobile apps experience some form of performance issues (#FAIL) despite having access and availability to seemingly unlimited amounts of affordable compute power? Well…it’s complicated. First of all, very few of these performance issues are based on a lack of capacity, but rather on configuration, setup, design, or implementation issues. All of which could easily have been discovered through testing.

Which brings us to the app market’s “dirty little secret”…that at least 75% of all web and mobile apps GO LIVE without ever being load (scale) tested, despite the potential volatility and volume of today’s web traffic. Having run one of the largest financial services SaaS sites in the early 2000s, I can tell you this: all of us building and deploying these apps want them to be fully scale tested. Especially in light of recent surveys, which indicate that even the most minor app performance issues (500ms) can lead to a significant amount of lost revenue (1% of sales). So why don’t we scale test these sites?

While the answers may vary slightly, it is almost always that the traditional enterprise-class test solutions are way too expensive and take way too long to set up and analyze results. The only alternative to these expensive test solutions like HP LoadRunner and MicroFocus Silk, has been the recent emergence of a number of easy-to-use and low cost test tools such as jMeter and Grinder. Unfortunately these tools lack many of the most basic components of load testing, such as integrated analytics and automation of test deployment, leaving the need for additional products to fill in. The options of choosing between expensive & slow vs. cheap & lacking features most often leads to the decision of not testing at all.

It has been our vision here at SOASTA to change app testing forever. First, we changed testing by introducing “Cloud Computing” as the new platform to test from back in 2007. Then (in April) by introducing the first load and performance test platform specifically for Mobile applications. And now today (once again) we are changing testing by announcing the First FREE (Enterprise Class) test solution built specifically for web and mobile testing. The name of our new edition is CloudTest Lite, (beta available today).

CloudTest Lite is the same award winning enterprise class test solution that is currently being used by many of the leading consumer facing and enterprise companies such as Mattel, Gilt Groupe, Hallmark, Intuit, Verizon and Netflix. It includes SOASTA’s award winning (patented) technology with its extremely easy-to-use test creation and deployment processes, as well as SOASTA’s advanced and integrated real-time analytics engine. The only limitation to CloudTest Lite versus our other CloudTest editions is in the size of the test that can be performed…it is set at a maximum of 100 concurrent users per test. For perspective, an “average” app on a normal day of usage will experience between 50-250 concurrent users. To test 100 users just a few years ago using a sophisticated test solution would have cost around $100,000; with CloudTest Lite, now it is FREE and could and should lead to regular scale testing of applications.

It is our sincere hope, that this announcement of CloudTest Lite will once again transform the app development world by introducing a test platform for daily scale testing of web and mobile applications.

What Keeps a 100-Year-Old Company Feeling Like a Teenager?

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jun 06, 2011. Leave a Comment

This year IBM turns 100 years old, and last week IBM’s “Watson” was named 2011 “Person of the Year” by the Webby Awards. The mere thought of IBM as a start-up (circa 1911) boggles my mind, especially when you consider that this year they reached their all-time high water mark at $205B in market valuation. This feat is even more amazing given the somewhat rocky road that they traveled during the late 80’s and 90’s. Over the last ten years under the watchful eye of Sam Palisamo, IBM is beginning to experience a rebirth. While they are nowhere near the dominant leadership position that they held over the technology sector from 1940 – 1980 when the market was defined as “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs,” today they are beginning to show signs of re-emergence as — if nothing else — the “supervising adult ” that their 100 years of existence entitles them to.

So what keeps an old company relevant after all these (100) years? Probably the same things that keep older people young…they hang out with their kids or grandchildren. In IBM’s case they have learned (over the years) to partner with a few young, innovative companies that are proving to be the new “game changers” in several traditional markets — even in some markets that have long been considered to be IBM’s strongholds. By partnering up with these young “upstarts,” IBM has given their customers fresh alternatives for new technologies and approaches for dealing with a rapidly changing business world. Perhaps even more importantly for many of their customers, IBM is also delivering a much-needed layer of “adult supervision” in this increasingly crowded and complex vendor landscape. Their years of experience enable IBM to become a trusted advisor to their customers on how to navigate through this vendor mine field.

As one those lucky few young upstarts that Grandpa IBM has chosen to partner with, we here at SOASTA get the advantage of their many years of experience surviving and thriving in both up and down markets. We also get to benefit from what may be the greatest technology distribution channel ever compiled, a channel that no start-up could ever replicate organically.

Time will only tell if Grandpa IBM and its young upstart partner SOASTA will make an interesting combination for the IBM nation, but the hourglass has been turned. One thing is for sure, SOASTA is one youngster that is eager to learn from Grandpa.

Will the Cloud Change the Industry Giants or Will the Giants Change the Cloud?

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jun 01, 2011. Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of years or so the technology giants such as IBM, HP, Cisco, Oracle and Microsoft have all announced cloud strategies — all with promises of multi-billion dollar investments backing these strategies up. Some have even predicted that cloud computing is the key to their future over the next ten years. This type of affirmation from these industry leaders is pretty heady stuff for a cloud industry in its own infancy…but will it become a reality? Will the industry leaders of today’s technology market be the leaders of tomorrow’s?

Most people following this market will say “absolutely,” even though the majority of cloud innovation continues to flow from early stage start-ups in this space today. It is also clear that the technology giants have both the cash reserves and the desire to take a leadership position in the cloud through acquisition. But is this enough?

The biggest obstacle to the giants achieving their ultimate goal of owning the cloud may be in their existing business models. The very same business model that has been the envy of the industry for the past thirty years may, in fact, be a roadblock to owning the cloud unless something changes.

Companies such as IBM, HP, and Oracle have been built largely on top of enormous distribution channels of direct sales and support personnel to attract new and maintain existing customers. While these channels have been the envy of the industry for the past thirty years, they also come at an enormous cost that must be compensated for in these companies’ pricing models. Conversely, the cloud’s on-demand pay-per-use business model (often defined as the “anti-lock-in” model) may be the antithesis of the enterprise site license that was popular in the 80’s and 90’s. Most importantly for publicly traded companies is that the cloud’s on-demand model offers limited visibility into projected or future revenue streams, which is a major issue in delivering guidance to share holders. Even worse, the average deal size for on-demand servers ranging from $.10 to $.80 per server hour rarely, if ever, goes over $100,000, let alone the $1M threshold that commonly justifies the existence of a direct sales organization. So the problem is, how do these companies sell cloud services? Their existing channels are focused on $1M deals, so getting their attention on a $50,000 cloud services deal may prove to be problematic. Developing a new organization around selling cloud services may cause some major internal channel conflict.

These challenges may explain why there have been more announcements and declarations than actual cloud successes so far from the industry giants. That said, I would not bet against them, as cash is still king…but I suspect independent cloud divisions will have to be formed to achieve any quick success. It also means that lean and agile cloud start-ups that are evolving from the beginning around an on-demand model model have more of a fighting chance than start-ups in previous generations. I, for one, am looking forward to seeing how the cloud market plays out between the “Davids” and the “Goliaths.”

Web Apps in the future will be full of “Cloud Monkeys”

Posted by Tom Lounibos on May 18, 2011. 1 Comment

Adrian Cockroft, chief architect at Netflix, recently posted a very interesting blog about how Netflix has begun to send “chaos monkeys” through their web applications for the sole purpose of creating performance issues. For those of you (non-testers) who are giggling right now, “monkey testing” is a pretty commonly used term in web application testing. It is used to describe the random tests that are generated by automated testing tools. There are “smart monkeys” and “dumb monkeys.” Smart monkeys are pretty valuable for load and stress testing, as they typically find a significant number of bugs in applications as well as configuration issues in infrastructure and networks. The problem has always been that smart monkeys have traditionally been very expensive and time consuming to develop. Dumb monkeys are inexpensive but are far less effective in finding performance issues.
Enter the age of the “Cloud Monkey.” Cloud Monkeys are even smarter than the traditional test monkeys that have been used in testing for the past 20 years, and they are only a fraction of the cost. For example, Cloud Monkeys (which are generated by SOASTA CloudTest) can replicate the exact use case scenarios of your most profitable users and any other type of web user that your application may encounter. If you plan to market directly to a specific user community, you can instantly scale your Cloud Monkey’s population to simulate hundreds or millions of that community’s users. Cloud Monkeys can live exclusively (in captivity) inside your test lab or they could live (continuously) inside your production sites next to your actual user community. What makes a Cloud Monkey particularly different than a traditional test monkey is its ability to scale. Within minutes, Cloud Monkeys can scale their population into the millions to stress your applications, infrastructure and network providers in preparation for a product launch or marketing event. Cloud Monkeys are also smart enough to capture critical performance metrics along its journey and deliver an end-to-end and real-time view of their findings. Most importantly, Cloud Monkeys are only a fraction of the cost of traditional test monkeys because cloud resources generate them. There is no question that we are the entering the Age of the Cloud Monkey…and you can expect trillions of these monkeys to appear in your applications and infrastructure in the coming months.

Are Enterprise Cloud Platforms Pivoting Vertically?

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Jan 31, 2011. 1 Comment

Up until now Cloud Platforms have typically been defined as Public, Private, or Hybrid.   These descriptions, of course, are based almost entirely on the accessibility and ownership of the servers and not by the application in which they are being used.  This may all be changing in the coming months, especially for the enterprise market as “vertical” clouds begin to emerge. These new vertical platforms will continue to offer all the same capabilities that current private, public, and hybrid cloud platforms offer today, however they will also begin to offer more industry and application specific cloud services over a network of cloud providers.  Think of a Financial Services Cloud Platform (or even a Brokerage Platform) that may deliver a greater level of security around customer data. Or a US-based Health Care Cloud Platform that offers additional HIPPA compliance capabilities.

For our part, SOASTA has been building such a vertical cloud platform for the past three years and will be unleashing it (next week) for the first time with a brand new product announcement. This new SOASTA offering will be the largest Test Platform ever assembled, built exclusively for companies needing to quickly and affordably perform Load and Performance testing on their consumer facing web sites. It will provide a powerful illustration of how cloud computing has been vertically optimized by a specific application and not the other way around.

More and more vertical cloud implementations will be emerging in the coming months, and with them greater value in cloud computing, especially for those of you in the enterprise markets.

The 2010 Cloud Capacity Surge

Posted by Tom Lounibos on Dec 19, 2010. Leave a Comment

SOASTA has held a unique position in the cloud community, allowing us to watch its evolution over the years. As one of only a few enterprise cloud applications, on any given day we may be looking for up to 10,000 cloud servers to simulate millions of virtual consumers for performance testing some of the world’s leading consumer web sites. With this in mind, we have had to be incredibly aware of the supply side of cloud computing. With this in mind, I’m happy to report that 2010 has been a very good year for cloud capacity growth (availability of cloud servers), as well as the elastic APIs required to access them.

Perspective: in 2009 there were only a couple of cloud data centers that offered infrastructure as a service and they were only in the US. For a company that regularly needed a few hundred cloud servers Amazon AWS was the only real supplier for us back then. But our business continued to grow, and naturally, in late 2009, we were very concerned that cloud capacity might not be able to keep up with us…. and everyone else.

As we come to the end of 2010, I’m very happy to report that indeed it has. Thanks to the continued growth of Amazon and the emergence of major players, such as Microsoft Azure, IBM and Rackcloud, as well as several regional players, cloud capacity has taken off in 2010. With CloudTest we can now provision thousands of cloud servers from more than (20) locations around the world, all in a matter of minutes. Amazon AWS has (4) major cloud centers in place today with several new ones planned in 2011. Microsoft dramatically changed the landscape in 2010 by adding (6) major cloud data centers. And watch out for IBM in 2011 as they add up to (10) new cloud data centers. The growth in cloud capacity in 2010 has been startling, even to us that have been watching closely. It’s a clear barometer that cloud computing is primed for takeoff in the Enterprise in 2011.

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