Know Your Application’s Current Characteristics

Before you move your application to the cloud and risk facing scaling issues, make sure that you monitor your application identify its key performance indicators:

• Demand periods—Does the application have periods of high or low demand, such as 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.?

• Average users—How many users typically use the system simultaneously?

• Disk-storage requirements—What are the application’s typical disk-storage needs? Are the files permanent or temporary? Are most operations read or write operations?

• Database-storage requirements—What are the application’s database requirements? Is the database replicated in real time? What is the application’s database read/write ratio?

• RAM use—What is the application’s range of physical and virtual memory use?

• Bandwidth consumption—What is the application’s bandwidth requirement?

• Caching—How does the application currently cache data?

• Security—Does your application have unique security or data-privacy considerations?

• Encryption—How will the cloud-service provider encryption your data in transit and at rest?

• Network considerations—Does the application have unique network considerations, such as specific port use or firewall configurations?

• API—Do your applications require application-program-interface (API) access to the cloud data?