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Cloud vendors claiming to be the “fastest” or “best performing” deserve a little scepticism. While speed and performance can appear impressive if conditions are aligned in a particular way, it doesn’t mean they will hold up in the long-term.

For companies searching for the right cloud provider, data on performance expectations is essential as it relates to picking the right host, managing scalability, and effectively spending on resources. Companies can use the following three tips to correctly gauge cloud performance and reliability.

Get the most out of every pound, euro or dollar

In the best case scenario, you want reliable performance at a fair price while also escaping any hidden costs that may ruin the true ROI. You want servers that can offer superb disk read performance and disk write capabilities while also performing well under varied test scenarios.

For instance, ask for test data that shows the servers’ I/O profile for both large and small block sizes. Review several comparable pieces of hardware to find outstanding performers. Why does this type of performance matter?

Here’s an example: If you are running a SQL Server database that typically works on 64k blocks, you want a server that offers consistent storage, reliable performance and no additional charges for provisioned input or output operations per second (IOPS). You want the perfect mix of fewer required resources and transparent costs.

Focus on efficient decision making

Remember the book “The Paradox of Choice”, which explores choice overload and why offering too many options is detrimental? The same issues apply to picking a server.

Some cloud providers offer many server choices, which can lead customers into selecting one that has too much RAM in order to meet another criteria such as having enough CPUs. Aim to find a vendor that doesn’t bury you under a mountain of canned server sizes, but rather lets you choose the server capacity that best suits your workload.

You also want the flexibility to choose the amount of CPUs or memory that makes sense for your business – similar to how you would purchase traditional servers. Spend less time reviewing dozens of server configurations and more time focusing on app and services development.

Scalability and predictable performance are crucial

While performance testing can help you understand the best way to scale an application, a conclusion can’t be reached without understanding how the platform reacts to spikes in its capacity.

Performance metrics from reputable third-parties, such as CloudHarmony, can be used to compare a range of cloud servers to a bare metal reference system. You want to be sure this performance metric improves linearly with the addition of CPU cores.

Understanding this server performance data can help you make the most of a cloud portfolio; it will give you peace of mind to know ahead of time that you can add resources to a VM before requiring more hardware, and that you can reduce costs too. If you choose cloud hardware that can scale both up and out, you’ll be in the best situation to plan your scaling events.

Performance metrics only show a moment in time, but having a long-term performance profile allows companies to make educated choices while still lowering costs.

I know of several large financial institutions that do all of their performance testing inside the firewall, and thus they own all of their own infrastructure, including dedicated servers that are used solely for load generation. With some of the large load generation requirements (which can be in the hundreds of thousands of vUsers), you can imagine that even a small bump in optimization of a load server could potentially save a company quite a bit of infrastructure costs in the load server hardware alone. Which is why, as part of our best practices, SOASTA advocates calibration of load servers when using CloudTest.

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Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, a growing collection of integrated services—analytics, computing, database, mobile, networking, storage, and web. In the 12 months since Build 2014, Microsoft has delivered over 500 new Azure services and features, and greatly expanded the footprint and capabilities of what Azure delivers. Here’s a snapshot of Azure Allure, articulated by Microsoft exec Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of Cloud and Enterprise, at the Microsoft Build 2015 conference in San Francisco.

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In 2011 the US Federal Government issued a Cloud First policy mandating that agencies take full advantage of cloud computing benefits to maximize capacity utilization, improve IT flexibility and responsiveness, and minimize cost. Cloud computing is a design style that allows for efficient use of compute, storage, and memory in order to decrease cycle time for mission delivery and promises to change the way that agencies deliver services to citizens for the next twenty years.

Roger Hockenberry, CEO of Cognitio and former CTO for the National Clandestine Services of the Central Intelligence Agency, helped create and realize the potential of cloud capabilities for the Intelligence Community. Getting the Intelligence Community to accept Cloud computing as a viable platform was a difficult road to travel. This interview with Roger offers some thoughts and suggestions for a successful Cloud journey:

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Ten years ago, there may have been only a single application that talked directly to the database and spit out HTML; customer service, sales – most of the organizations I work with have been moving toward a design philosophy more like unix, where each application consists of a series of small tools stitched together. In web example above, that likely means a login service combines with webpages that call other services – like enter and update record. That allows the customer service team to write their own tools using the web, the command line, scheduled, or any other interface.

Sound too good to be true, doesn’t it? It is true, but it comes at a cost. For example, I never defined a mechanism to manage the explosion of APIs that will result under this approach. Consider this: uncontrolled growth is one definition of cancer.
Since the rapid creation of APIs is not quite so deadly, I will call this the API Sprawl; I’ve seen it across every client that moved to web-services approach, typically two to four years into conversion.

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A new report from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services argues that as cloud usage in the enterprise continues to rise, collaboration is now the key benefit ahead of business agility.

The research, which had more than 450 participants and was sponsored by Verizon Enterprise Solutions, found 84% of respondents agreeing their organisation’s use of cloud computing had increased in the past year. 72% said their use of cloud increased collaboration options, while 71% argued business agility had been increased. Essentially, the value of the cloud comes from speed as opposed to cost savings, enabling more fluid working relationships between traditionally separate entities.

One sign of a growing maturity in the space is that companies are not as quick to espouse the competitive advantage cloud normally brings. Whereas in 2014 30% of respondents argued cloud gave their organisation a “significant” competitive advantage, that number drops to 16%. The majority of this disparity is found in those who said cloud gave “a little” competitive advantage – 23% in 2015 compared to 11% in 2014.

Cloud is no longer a differentiator – however not being on it would be a significant disadvantage

Interestingly, as the benefits of cloud computing become more apparent to the C-suite, the number of respondents who admit they don’t know if their organisation has benefitted has dropped (18% in 2014, 11% in 2015). Yet as one respondent put it, “Cloud is no longer a differentiator; however, not being on it would be a significant disadvantage.”

As ever in these instances, security (29%) continues to be top of mind for qualities that matter in a cloud provider. Integration with other systems (26%) was also seen as important by respondents, alongside compliance (18%), long term financial stability (18%), and the ability to provide cloud management capabilities (14%).

Despite this, Siki Giunta, global SVP cloud at Verizon Enterprise, insists security is no longer the barrier to adoption it once was. “Cloud is no longer on the fringes of enterprise IT – but as it matures, there are new obstacles to be faced,” she wrote. “Only now the challenges aren’t about gaining acceptance, but about how to get more from cloud to keep driving growth and profitability.”

You can find the full report here (email required).