Condensing droplets in the highly distributed cloud

As the mists clear and the clouds of hosted application Nirvana finally form a compute cumulo nimbus ball of white fluffy perfection, is there a likelihood of highly distributed applications being increasingly split apart to sit on different clouds?

One might reasonably argue that the answer is yes – and that this is already happening. One might also argue that this is a natural organic development, which simply replicates the way a traditional highly distributed application would extend roots outward to form links with data and processing power in more than one physical location

But oh no – just as enterprise cloud deployment was starting to billow and flutter like a nice billowy-fluttery thing the apps themselves start to become more architecturally complex. Management gets a whiff of this challenge and the words RISK, SECURITY and additional COST flag up in flashing red neon. The corporate cloud enablement programme is put on ice and everyone nips off down the pub.

Somewhere in the middle of the second round down at the Fragmentation & Firkin, someone stops halfway through a pork scratching and says, “Hey, you’d think there would be an application performance monitoring and management product for highly distributed cloud-based applications wouldn’t ya?” But nobody listens and someone else suggests a game of darts so the thought is lost.

Unbeknownst to the IT team (who were now seriously well oiled) back at the office, application performance management (APM) had been diligently trying to shake off its legacy APM 1.0 tag and build new distributed capabilities for not only the cloud, but also virtual and physical environments.

You see, all that while, there had been this company called AppDynamics who had just released version 2.0 of its eponymously named product that supported distributed, revenue-critical applications in production environments.

What the IT department forgot was that a visual map of the distributed application structure to illuminate application topology was really going to help, even when agile development introduces new code.

Not only that, there was also now a chance to get hold of Transaction Flow Monitoring technology to provide visibility into how each transaction performs as it journeys along the distributed environment, a technique that enables Operations to be more precise in troubleshooting application problems.

Oh there was more too, deep diagnostics, policy driven business transaction performance detection and even cloud orchestration to enable companies to intelligently scale up and scale down capacity as needed.

But none of this was of any use, as the IT project manager was having extreme difficulty standing and most of his team were pushing money into the fruit machines and quiz games like their life depended on it. Meanwhile, AppDynamics apparently went on to be quite successful in the APM 2.0 distributed app space – and here our story ends. Or rather, it begins…