Compuware's CloudSleuth collaborative cloud computing community

Actually I would have gone for a volcanic ash cloud themed title for this blog, but with that much alliterative C-value I had to stick with the vendor's actual brand name.

I suppose it was inevitable that once we had all truly embraced the concept (if not the widespread implementation) of cloud-based computing, that the industry around us would evolve a family of incremental services.

What am I talking about? The collaborative cloud, the best practice cloud and the federated cloud too of course! Hey, there's the iPad cloud server back up application Rackspace Cloud Pro already and that's the terms "iPad" and "cloud" in one sentence, so what more could you ask for?

So collaborative cloud computing, that must be an initiative to enable project teams using cloud-based computing resources to tighten their lifecycle management processes and pool resources as they work together more effectively right?

Not quite.

Compuware's CloudSleuth (in beta until summer) uses what the company calls "real" data to drive discussions about cloud performance management. Discussions? Well, they could have chosen a better word perhaps. What it really takes shape as is a community-driven website which offers a range of performance visualisations based on cloud services that are actually in service.

Kind of like a free cloud templating tool if you like.

Actually, Compuware says that the information that will come from the CloudSleuth community will be freely shared to the benefit of both the users and the providers of cloud services.

Not enough acronyms and buzzwords for you yet? Try the 'federated cloud' out for size then.

The concept of the 'federated cloud' says that the cloud is an amalgamation of many resources i.e. an infrastructure and community not owned or operated by any one company or organisation), so to encourage the free exchange of information and best practices inside this community to solve common problems what do we do? Provide a discussion platform of course. Oh hang on sorry, maybe 'discussion' wasn't such a bad word to use to describe CloudSleuth after all.

Compuware says that, "CloudSleuth performance measurements are conducted from over 30 backbone nodes and hundreds of last mile peers around the world, rather than just a single location. This provides a true 360-degree view of the end-user experience of service providers in different geographies."

I suppose it's true, many cloud service providers have multiple, geographically distributed points of presence and users will access these through different communications service providers. So the net effect (I would imagine) is that the end user experience of a cloud service provider depends on the performance of both the cloud service provider and the communications service provider and can vary widely across different geographies.

What's the result of all this for developers then? Well, application architects and developers want to be able to exchange information on best practices for building the cloud-powered 'borderless' applications right? So logically, during the development and test phases, they need real-time information on the end-to-end performance of their applications to determine the cause of performance issues i.e. is it their code, the network, or the service provider that's slowing things up.

Compuware's argument is that CloudSleuth provides the additional software technology that developers will need here, which (if you buy the argument so far) allows them to get greater context by correlating the status of the cloud provider's service with the response-time data returned from their application.

OK, no more comment from me, just a link to the CloudSleuth website if you wish to look skyward for anything other than volcanic dust. There, I did it – I knew I could crowbar one more volcano reference in there somewhere!