Hybrid Cloud For Dummies

Managing Heterogeneous Applications

When your application is on your premises, you control it. This means you control the whole stack — the infrastructure, the operating system, the middleware, the data, the application, and the runtime environment. In a PaaS environment, the PaaS provider manages everything up to the application and possibly the database. The provider is dealing with installs, updates, and patches to the production environment. It’s a self-managed environment. The issue becomes this — how can you manage cloud applications together with those developed on-premises? You need to measure the impact of IT performance on the business that, by definition, now includes the performance of the cloud provider.

Here’s a simple scenario that drives home this point. Assume you have contracted with a PaaS provider to build and deploy your application. The application starts to have a problem. When something goes wrong, figuring out the source can be tough. The key is to be able to trace the source of the problem quickly. Did the platform provider just upgrade the operating system? Is there a power outage? Was there a security breach on the provider’s end? Or is it something on your end?

Gaining visibility

The bottom line is that you must be able to gain visibility into at least three areas:

Security: To monitor security, you need to scan networks, operating systems, and applications ...