Compuware Launches CloudSleuth Beta

Compuware has launched beta of a new technology known as CloudSleuth, which is a collaborative cloud computing community web portal.

Compuware announced the beta of CloudSleuth at the Cloud Expo 2010 Conference. And Compuware’s director of cloud computing, Doug Willoughby, will speak at a Cloud Expo session on 21 April entitled “Performance Management for Composite Applications.” Willoughby also will give attendees a sneak peek at the CloudSleuth technology. Although the CloudSleuth beta went public on 19 April, the site will not officially launch until later this summer, Compuware said. CloudSleuth uses real data to drive discussions about cloud performance management.

Infrastructure as a service

According to Compuware officials, the company began the CloudSleuth project as an internal effort to build a cloud performance visualization tool to help Compuware better understand the reliability and consistency of the most popular public infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) cloud providers. But the tool proved so valuable that the company decided to make it more broadly available.

The methodology page on the CloudSleuth beta site said CloudSleuth uses the Gomez Performance Network (GPN) to measure the performance of an identical sample application running on several popular cloud service providers. However, while it uses the same tools and techniques as Gomez’s formal benchmarks, CloudSleuth is actually a near real-time visualization tool rather than a benchmark, Compuware said. And unlike benchmarks, which are published periodically, CloudSleuth provides users with a continuously updating view into the performance of cloud service providers.

Moreover, the CloudSleuth beta site described the technology’s overall approach:

“CloudSleuth’s approach is conceptually very simple. We deploy an identical ‘target’ application to each cloud platform. The Gomez Performance Network (GPN) is used to run test transactions on the deployed target applications and monitor the response time and availability from various points around the globe. Hundreds of data points from each successive test run are collected and aggregated into a cloud performance database. CloudSleuth’s visualisation tools enable users to visually interact with the data from the cloud performance database.”

Meanwhile, at the Cloud Expo, in his presentation, Willoughby will discuss how the benefits of cloud computing can deliver new IT functionality to the business quickly and at low initial cost. Additionally, he will highlight how borderless applications present a new challenge to IT departments: managing application performance and availability when the application assets cross organisational and geographic borders. Such borderless applications seamlessly integrate cloud, web and data center services together, while maintaining the end-user perspective that they are single applications. Willoughby will detail how enterprises can tackle the performance challenges presented by this new application delivery model.

“While mission-critical applications will still typically be provided by company-owned resources in the data centre, IT departments will increasingly use cloud-based applications and services to more rapidly deliver new functionality to the business,” Willoughby said in a statement. “The success of such efforts will depend on tools that stop the finger-pointing and give IT performance visibility across the enterprise and Internet to cloud services providers. I look forward to sharing use cases and real world examples with my peers at Cloud Expo 2010 and to detailing how the entire IT community–IT operations, cloud service providers, architects and developers–can build and deploy cloud-based applications with optimal performance in mind.”

The beta version of CloudSleuth is available at: www.cloudsleuth.net.