CloudSleuth makes clouds more transparent

Beverley Head
Monday, 01 November 2010 16:20

IT Industry - Development

CloudSleuth, an online tool which shows how well cloud computer companies are providing their services in different parts of the world, has gone live. According to the system, Sydney based users of Google Apps are currently experiencing backbone network latencies of around 15 seconds, compared to 14.15 seconds for Microsoft's Windows Azure and almost 18 seconds for users of Amazon's EC2 cloud.

The beta version of the CloudSleuth service, which provides a visual tool to monitor cloud systems, was released in May. Since then Compuware has been signing up partners to participate in the programme, which is intended to help IT managers pick the right cloud service for their needs.

According to Rafi Katanasho, Compuware director ANZ and Japan; 'For organisations considering a move to the cloud this gives than an indication of what to expect from a performance perspective.' At present all the cloud partners are based overseas, but Mr Katanasho said he was hopeful of adding Australian based cloud providers shortly.

Mr Katanasho identified Telstra, Optus, Hostworks and Macquarie Telecom as organisations of particular interest.

The system works by using the Gomez network (which also tracks website performance) to monitor how quickly different clouds perform an identical application which has been loaded onto the individual clouds. (Compuware bought Gomez for $US295 million last year.)

The CloudSleuth website displays a map of the world showing the international performance of cloud providers. Countries experiencing application latencies of less than 3 seconds display green, latencies of 3-6 seconds display yellow, and above 6 seconds the country shows red.

At present Australia is uniformly crimson. Latencies are even worse when compared over the last mile network, rather than the backbone cloud network, which gives a truer picture of what users would really expect to experience using an application hosted in a cloud.