Performance Engineering: Why is it Important in Cloud Computing

Unlike what some folks will have, you know, performance engineering constitutes a critical part of both hardware as well as software. However, before we can delve into that topic any further, allow us to first quickly walk you through precisely what performance engineering is — it will help clear up any doubts. You see, it is just a method, a technique, if you will, that enables developers to determine either how the system is already performing or how well it will perform. The key focus, as is evident, is performance. 

It encompasses the system’s life cycle in its entirety, i.e. it starts from deciding the technology stack to live monitoring, migration, and up-gradation. Now, as to why performance engineering is essential — a system typically comprises several intricate modules that empower it to deliver high-quality experiences and functionalities. Performance engineering helps make sure that this system is amply stable.

However, as is with everything else, a scope for enhancement has been observed — and that can be achieved with assistance from cloud computing. Another modern-day technological marvel, cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of digital services such as apps, data storage, and more. There is no dearth of facets of performance engineering that stand to benefit from cloud computing. And to help drive the point home, we have listed some of these benefits below.

1. Performance monitoring: While there are a plethora of both new technologies as well as middleware to assist large scale systems that deal with big data, they still suffer from the lack of performance tracking and analysis strategies that not only deliver performance metrics but also ensures that they are examined and analyzed in relation to the new technologies and middleware we just mentioned. In this context, one can then make use of cloud monitoring and management services, which is data obtained from tracking plenty of customer systems being stored by the service provider in a centralized repository.
2. Analysis of data: There is no denying that the world has finally come to appreciate collecting monitoring data. Unfortunately, we still seem to have made no progress in regards to analyzing the humongous amounts of data thus gathered, i.e., it continues to be an issue. Thankfully, there are several promising answers to be found in cloud computing to this particular problem as well. First, there is log management as a service that facilitates log analysis for large numbers. And that’s not all — real-time analytics for performance monitoring is also a rising star in the ecosystem. And that’s not all — experts believe machine learning techniques, data mining, anomaly detection, and more also ought to be eligible to be offered as ‘as a service’ performance monitoring tools. The service providers of such devices will have access to an abundance of customer data, which means as a service resource will then be exposed to said data. It, in turn, will engender the scope for better leveraging data mining methods. 
3. Autonomics: When systems start to scale, manual management of performance is rendered highly challenging, if not wholly impossible. Thankfully, automatic scaling underpinned by user-specified thresholds and alerting is now increasingly offered “as a service.” However, this is still in nascent stages, and companies will need more advancement in this arena to enable the integration of performance monitoring. And that, in turn, will enable enhanced autonomic performance management. But if you need specifics, automatic scaling as a service still needs decision-making research, monitoring techniques, and real-time analytics to achieve the genuinely autonomic management process.

As evidenced by the discussion above, cloud computing can enable unprecedented performance engineering benefits. However, to achieve those benefits, one must first skilfully navigate the challenges posed by cloud computing. Once that is done, the duo can together help companies and industries successfully deal with modern-day problems.