Four key issues of living with the "cloud"

A review of the industry posts and my own view of living with the "cloud" indicates that we will need to address 4 key issues:

1. Security of data
2. Cost of network getting to the cloud
3. Managing capacity/performance
4. Monitoring for availability and diagnosing issues

I believe that with standard metrics of CPU, internal messaging and I/O, we can forecast the required capacity and associated performance by leveraging performance testing and capacity modeling in the lab. I have used a similar approach to defining capacity for real metal environments and I believe it provides reasonable estimates for private clouds. Let me know if you have an interest in discussing this.

Monitoring availability and diagnosing issues can be addressed with colocation of a subset of the production environment that is privately managed. Alternatively, if you are using Gigaspaces, Dynatrace has a product offering that they indicate allows you to view utilization of your Gigaspaces XAP implementation on Amazon's EC2. You would still need to manually correlate the end-user experience with the utilization shown in Dynatrace. See http://blog.dynatrace.com/2009/05/07/proof-of-concept-dynatrace-provides-cloud-service-monitoring-and-root-cause-analysis-for-gigaspaces/.

Cost of network getting to the cloud can be addressed in many ways and measured accurately.

I believe that security of data will be addressed with defined process and auditing of cloud providers in the same way that we address it today with other outsourced services, e.g., a SAS-70 audit.