Steven Haines

Author Archives: Steven Haines

IDG Contributor Network: Doesn’t the cloud solve all of my performance issues?

I have heard it said many times that the cloud can solve all of our performance issues. There are two reasons why this claim is not necessarily true: A misunderstanding of the difference between performance and scalability. Performance remains application-dependent. Performance versus scalability The terms performance and scalability are sometimes used interchangeably, but in actuality they have very distinct differences. The important distinction between the terms is that performance is a measure of a data point, such as the response time of a request, the amount of CPU or memory that a request needs, etc. Scalability, on the other hand, measures your application’s ability to maintain its performance as load increases. In other words, if you can service a single request in 500ms, can you service 1000 requests at 500ms each or does the response time degrade as your load increases?To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Migrating to the cloud: You want me to lift and shift what?

I recently participated in a webinar, and one of the questions I was asked made me think about a great first topic for this blog: What are the key drivers to keep an application and “lift and shift”?If you’re in a company that has a plan to move to the cloud, you’ve probably been asked what it is going to take to move an existing application to the cloud. In one of my previous roles, our CIO gave us the mandate that we were going to move everything out of one of our expensive data centers to the cloud within two years, so I saw a lot of “lift and shift” requests. But not a single one of those requests resulted in a lift and shift.Let’s review the benefits of running in the cloud and then see if we can characterize the types of applications that will run well in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Migrating to the cloud: You want me to lift and shift what?

I recently participated in a webinar, and one of the questions I was asked made me think about a great first topic for this blog: What are the key drivers to keep an application and “lift and shift”?If you’re in a company that has a plan to move to the cloud, you’ve probably been asked what it is going to take to move an existing application to the cloud. In one of my previous roles, our CIO gave us the mandate that we were going to move everything out of one of our expensive data centers to the cloud within two years, so I saw a lot of “lift and shift” requests. But not a single one of those requests resulted in a lift and shift.Let’s review the benefits of running in the cloud and then see if we can characterize the types of applications that will run well in the cloud.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here