The goal of application management is to achieve peak application performance. While there is no single architecture that can guarantee peak performance for every application, there are ways to help boost cloud performance across the board:
- Right-sizing instances. As mentioned, start by selecting the right resources to run a workload.
- Autoscaling. Public cloud computing is dynamic by nature, and you want to be able to add and subtract instances on demand. These services provide ways to apply rules to track when a workload exceeds or recedes from a certain threshold, and trigger resources to readjust.
- Caching. Accessing storage can slow application responsiveness. With cached data, an application can execute tasks much faster than if it had to access data that resides in regular storage.
- Microservices. In a microservices architecture, an application's major features and functions are built in modular services. An application that is broken into a series of programs that are individually deployed, operated and scaled will be more responsive than one that's monolithic.
- Event-driven architectures.Also called serverless computing, event-driven architectures can run on cloud services. Here, developers place code for certain software behaviors and functions into the cloud platform. It only operates when it's triggered by an actual event. When the function is complete, it no longer consumes cloud resources.
Another way IT shops can manage application performance in the cloud is through load balancing, which distributes network traffic so that each instance operates at peak efficiency. In prior days, load balancers operated locally as a data center appliance. Today, it is typically an application that lives on a server and is offered as a network service.
