How to overcome cloud performance issues when migrating to the cloud
By Jean-Philippe Avelange, Chief Information Officer, Expereo
The cloud computing landscape is evolving faster than ever anticipated. According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud end-user spending will reach nearly $600 billion in 2023, suggesting the pace of innovation in the cloud and the emergence of new tools and services will continue to grow.
Though even with such fierce growth, many companies are still yet to recognize the full potential of the cloud, often due to issues with migration. Whether you’re operating public, private, or hybrid, the cloud has multiple moving parts working in tandem for maximum efficiency, and it is paramount that they work seamlessly in partnership. In the early stages of cloud migration, it’s normal for businesses to experience performance issues, but knowing how to effectively overcome these will enhance your chances of successfully implementing and executing your cloud migration strategy.
The challenge of eradicating the blind spots
The shift from on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud can often lead to blind spots within your network performance often hiding data from your monitoring tools. These gaps begin the moment the transition to the cloud takes place and are often a key contributor to any performance issues that might arise. In fact, research highlights that 51% of migrations fail, and said blind spots are one of the major reasons behind this.
The challenge that a lot of businesses face is that the majority of traditional network monitoring tools don’t work within the cloud. Trying to adapt to outdated tools within the cloud leads to an unnecessarily high level of monitoring costs eventually wiping out the savings gained from executing the original cloud migration.
It is therefore vital that businesses take back control and aim to achieve a high level of visibility across all stages of migrating to the cloud. For example, the use of real-time and application monitoring tools that go beyond the standard on-premise infrastructure can help reduce and limit the impact of blind spots during and after migration. Systems that deliver high-definition visibility across all applications of their network will enable businesses to identify the source of their issues in plain sight and help maximize their performance during and after cloud migration.
How to manage data in a hybrid cloud
As knowledge around cloud infrastructure continues to grow, more and more companies are turning to a hybrid approach when opting for the cloud. Hybrid cloud approaches allow companies to have a high level of agility in responding to changes, increased flexibility and scalability with their data storage, and ultimately an increased level of control and customization to fit the needs of your organization. That said, performance issues are still an ongoing problem when migrating to a hybrid cloud. With hybrid architecture the present and future for a lot of enterprises, data teams must be able to cut through the noise to help prevent performance issues and to optimize their cloud migration strategy.
The root of the problem when it comes to hybrid cloud performance issues is usually the overall availability, network latency, and application processing delays. As data resides in both private and public clouds, bottlenecks can occur as users attempt to access this data, significantly impacting the speed and performance of your database.
With this in mind, organizations should strongly consider what data they are looking to store in the cloud and what needs to be asynchronously updated. With large volumes of data, a lot of it often outdated, moving cloud to cloud at any one given time, organizations should ensure they encrypt their data as it travels through sites that might disrupt the workflow effectively, eliminating unwanted information and in turn, speeding up their transformation process.
Unnecessary API performance issues
A key contributor to cloud performance issues, and one that people often forget, is not being able to understand and design an API that boosts performance speed. An influx of unnecessary API calls can hinder the performance of the cloud provider, the developer, and all end users – many of which you should try and avoid.
Ultimately, it’s about finding an approach that leads to fewer API calls and as a result, less traffic. This all stems from having a fast and reliable network connection. A slow network can impact the performance of even the most well-designed APIs, even worse, an unreliable network can often lead to downtime, having a knock-on effect on promises that might have been made to clients using your service.
What’s more, using a cached version of a request can help avoid any database issues that might arise. When commonly used data is being stored, the newest update will be used. The simplest way to do this is to expire it every so often, or when certain data updates occur, force an expiration. As a result, server loads are often decreased, latency is reduced and all network failures are hidden while less bandwidth is used, all of which go a long way to boost cloud performance issues.
Put trust in the process
A lot of cloud migrations often fail as companies do not have the resilience to see out the process, but it’s totally normal for issues to occur when executing a cloud migration, it’s how you cope and deal with them that is important. My advice would be to just stick with it. Yes, problems will occur and some will take longer than others to resolve, but with the cloud growing at the rate it is and the benefits it can bring to your organization, putting 100% trust in the process is worthwhile.
