Investigating process and performance improvement in private cloud

When monitoring and managing performance, however, differing approaches are available. OVHcloud provides VMware’s vRealize suite to deliver automation, including dashboards, custom rules and custom metrics for management. This facilitates feedback on application response speed to determine maximum user load for a software application, and the creation of tags that can feed back on the health of virtual machines in situ.

Pirekh says the user simply needs to decide how to partition resources to suit the workloads they want to support. And, of course, once an understanding of what is happening is secured, enterprises often have a much better understanding of how to manage it as well.

Pirekh says its approach delivers enough visibility to help predict future capacity and resourcing needs via automation of different actions and creation of specific dashboards to monitor particular aspects of the private cloud environment, and tailored alerts.

“You can create alerts to a pre-existing action, whether it’s to power business intelligence [BI], restart the host, to add more CPU, or to move a virtual machine to another host,” he says. “And the vSphere vCenter hypervisor allows you to understand exactly what your resources are, and you can provision or remove resources through this so you don’t need to log into a separate cloud manager.”

Performance testing too should be adapted to organisational requirements. Users should determine what they require and how continuous improvement will be achieved in relation to key parameters like speed, stability and scalability, and work back from there to develop a continuous testing strategy that will optimise workloads.

Once that is achieved, it becomes time to look for incremental opportunities for optimisation based on the improvements made so far, says Pirekh.

“But you’re paying for a block of resources dedicated to you – it can be easier to manage in the private cloud environment. You probably need less process of continuous improvement than you would in a public cloud, because that has a lot more that you need to monitor to ensure you’re getting the efficiency,” he says.

Chris Yates, vice-president of marketing at cloud services provider Platform.sh, suggests not making too many generalisations about private cloud infrastructure, due partly to the potential challenges for users around owning and operating their network.

“There is an assumption that if you own the entire stack from beyond the bare metal, down to the datacentres, the cooling the procurement of equipment, and so on, then naturally you can see it,” says Yates. “Yet, at least with the customers we deal with, the challenge they have is that they’re ‘their own network’, if you will.”

At the same time, most systems today are “hugely distributed” which means dealing with a lot of variation in, for example, systems, processes and performance. It couldn’t be less like a neat and tidy setup where the racks are all “perfect” and everything is interconnected.

“You can have the latest networking gear and yet have a server literally sitting under somebody’s desk and running something critical, but you don’t know what that is,” he says. “Do you have absolute control over that sort of thing? It can be under their desk but they have zero visibility; they might not even know it exists.”