Performance Optimizations in a Cloud-Centric World

Introduction

Back in the day, it was simple...

Content was served from your server, over your network, and then to client machines that you controlled. Even when that moved out from a LAN to a WAN, the connectivity came from a single provider—it was all under your control.

Then came the Internet…

Now content was being served across the public Internet to end-user machines—you lost control of the location, type of machine, and type of connectivity.

Then came the cloud…

The cloud brought with it a new way of thinking about web system hosting. Hosting shifted from being a hand-crafted service to a commodity service providing throwaway systems. You moved from being a hardware owner to being a service consumer.

With this change came the increasing loss of control over your system. Nowadays your application is often the only element that you control directly, and even that can be dependent on consuming third-party services.

This is not a bad thing, but you need to be aware of the issues that can arise as a result of this shift to the cloud.

Whether you’ve already moved systems to the cloud or are thinking of doing so, this book will point out some of the risks to your site’s performance created by this loss of control and puts forth some methods to identify and then mitigate those risks.

In no way, though, does this book set out to deter you from moving into the cloud. This author has long been a cloud advocate and works almost exclusively on cloud-based systems.

Terminology

For simplicity, ...