OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE IN AMAZON EC2 INTRODUCTION: LEVERAGING THE PUBLIC CLOUD OPPORTUNITY WITH AMAZON EC2.

Transcription

1 OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE IN AMAZON EC2 While the business decision to migrate to Amazon public cloud services can be an easy one, tracking and managing performance in these environments isn t so clear cut. With Boundary, administrators can get a complete picture of the real-time performance of their Amazon EC2 deployments, so they can understand, control, and optimize application performance. INTRODUCTION: LEVERAGING THE PUBLIC CLOUD OPPORTUNITY WITH AMAZON EC2 Organizations in every industry and of every size have been moving quickly to capitalize on the benefits of public cloud computing models. Today, one of the leading providers of public cloud offerings is Amazon Web Services. The company leveraged the expertise it gained through the development of the infrastructure supporting Amazon.com, and built on this foundation to become one of the dominant companies in the cloud vendor segment. Our%customers,%and%our%business,% rely%extensively%on%our%cloud6based% infrastructure%to%deliver% sophisticated%and%resource6intensive% data%processing.%with%boundary,%our% IT%team%gets%the%vital%real6time% insights%it%needs%to%stay%on%top%of% traffic%patterns,%quickly%spot%and% address%issues,%and%tune%our% deployments%so%we%can%continue%to% deliver%optimal%service%levels%to%our% customers. % Dan%Lynn,%CTO,%FullContact%

2 Through the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the company offers customers resizable, on-demand computing capacity. Today, customers that leverage Amazon EC2 are enjoying a wide range of benefits, including cost savings, streamlined application development, improved agility, and operational efficiency. The use cases for Amazon EC2 provide a number of compelling business opportunities. For example, an on-demand entertainment company is using Amazon EC2 to help meet the huge spikes in video traffic that occur during prime viewing hours each evening, without having to invest in and support that extra infrastructure capacity the rest of the day. THE CHALLENGE: MANAGING PERFORMANCE OF AMAZON EC2 When organizations leverage Amazon EC2 infrastructures, they have to contend with several challenges: Frequent application changes. In Amazon EC2 environments, organizations are increasingly employing agile development approaches, which means more application changes are taking place more frequently. Consequently, it is paramount for development teams to be able to quickly deploy new code, while ensuring code changes don t adversely impact the user experience. Increased application complexity. In Amazon EC2 environments, application developers can t control the specific configurations of the underpinning systems, but rather have to rely on a generic infrastructure. Application developers need to execute code that accounts for these infrastructures, which can significantly increase application complexity. Unpredictable performance. Significant, often surprising, variations arise in performance within Amazon EC2 environments. For example, when communicating with another node cluster, two identical nodes may exhibit completely different performance characteristics. Even slight variations in performance can ultimately result in a range of issues and outages, but measuring these variances is a tough task for most IT teams today. Infrastructure fluidity. The network and physical infrastructure that underpins applications running in Amazon EC2 environments is completely fluid, with workloads being shifted constantly across different physical and virtual resources. These changes can have significant impact on applications, but most customers lack any visibility beyond the virtual machine itself. Consequently, it is next to impossible to understand, let alone control, how these infrastructure changes affect application performance. Copyright Boundary, Inc. All rights reserved. 2

3 How much latency is the underlying network imposing on application response times? How much data is being sent from the database to the application tier? Are instances properly sized to handle current volumes? In order to deliver and sustain optimal performance levels, administrators need to be able to quickly and authoritatively get answers to these questions, but today, most administrators lack the visibility required. THE REQUIREMENTS FOR MANAGING PERFORMANCE IN AMAZON EC2 ENVIRONMENTS Fundamentally, modern cloud environments like Amazon EC2 require innovative monitoring platforms. To optimize performance, IT teams need monitoring capabilities that are: Real time. Changes simply happen too fast to wait for hourly reports. Analytics based. Administrators need to be able to run intelligent queries based on the data collected, so they can gain useful insights. Simple. Set up, configuration, and administration need to be fast and easy. Dynamic. As environments change, monitoring platforms need to adapt, quickly and seamlessly. In-depth. To be effective, monitoring platforms need to provide a complete, detailed picture of the entire network. Predictive. Ultimately, administrators need to spot potential issues and address them, before they result in degradation. BOUNDARY: ENABLING INSIGHT AND OPTIMIZATION IN AMAZON EC2 ENVIRONMENTS With Boundary, administrators can get the real-time, data-centric monitoring insights they need to truly understand, control, and optimize performance of their Amazon EC2 environments. Rather than doing periodic sampling, Boundary inspects the header information of every single packet in the network, and gathers and reports on that data in seconds. This comprehensive data gathering coupled with powerful reporting yields the holistic insights administrators need to track and manage performance in Amazon EC2 environments. As a result, Boundary enables organizations to enjoy optimized performance, better leverage the capabilities of Amazon EC2, and streamline administration. Copyright Boundary, Inc. All rights reserved. 3

4 With Boundary, administrators can: Troubleshoot more quickly. With Boundary s comprehensive insights and alerting capabilities, administrators can find out immediately when issues arise, and instantly identify the source of the issue and how to address it. Establish effective baselines. Boundary provides a complete picture of the actual traffic between resources that support applications. With this view, administrators can establish effective baselines, and know immediately if changes to those baselines occur. Optimize application development and resource allocation. Once baselines are established, Boundary provides the real-time views that enable application developers to understand how code changes affect performance immediately, so they can ensure optimal user experience before rolling out to production. In addition, Boundary helps administrators track network and resource usage so they can make better informed decisions in terms of adding and allocating Amazon EC2 resources. Automatically add AWS service context to Performance Graphs. Who wants to look in multiple places to figure out what s going wrong in your application? The Boundary events service includes an out of the box feed from AWS Service Health Feeds. This will provide live AWS Service context to the Boundary application performance graphs." PLATFORM ADVANTAGES Boundary is the only platform that offers these advantages: Network coverage that yields application insights. Boundary reveals how applications perform by showing how they communicate across nodes on the network. Process unprecedented volumes of data. Whether an organization is running one request a second or one hundred thousand, Boundary offers the scalability to ensure administrators won t miss a thing. True real time. Boundary gathers the header information of every packet and securely streams it to the analytics engine once a second. Infrastructure agnostic. By focusing on network packets, the common thread in your environments, Boundary can track virtually any environment and application stack. Fast time to value. With its fast, simple deployment and pre-packaged, easily customizable reports, Boundary delivers insights and value in minutes both for experts and novices alike. Tailored to cluster management. With the platform s tagging capabilities, Boundary enables administrators to group data collection meters, for example application tiers or clusters, so administrators can manage performance within and among different groups. Copyright Boundary, Inc. All rights reserved. 4

5 HOW IT WORKS Boundary is comprised of these key functional areas: Flow ingress. Boundary employs meters that examine the header information in network packets. These meters gather the information and send it to the Boundary service. Data processing. The Boundary service includes a streaming engine that runs queries against the incoming data. Visualization and reports. Every second, the results of the streaming engine s queries are sent to the user s Web browser. ABOUT BOUNDARY Boundary ( enables organizations running big data applications to deliver continuous quality of service and enhance their operational agility. Unlike traditional monitoring solutions, Boundary believes in collecting all the data all the time and provides critical, real time application insights for dynamic infrastructures. Boundary is a privately held company based in San Francisco, California with venture funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. Copyright Boundary, Inc. All rights reserved. 5