Is the time right for cloud?

Latency in the cloud – a CBR special report

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Cloud latency

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C loud’s biggest problem may not be what you’ve been hearing for years: security. Instead,

especially when it comes to enterprise utilisation of public cloud in particular, the issue is actually that of ‘latency.’

What is latency in this context, and why would it be an issue for consuming and using technology remotely? Put at its simplest, latency in the enterprise IT sense is the time that it takes for messages to traverse the network (and back). But the type of latency you need to care about is even simpler: bad latency. If your message suffers as little as 20 milliseconds (1/1000th of a second) delay, it’s been proven, you are looking at a 15% plunge in Web page load time. That’s possibly annoying, but not fatal. If bad latency means you

are too late to make a sale or a buy if you’re a City firm, game over.

When did we start worrying about latency? Only recently, for most of us. Pre-Internet, latency was more or less a direct function of the capacity of your organisation’s own networking assets, in the shape of the physical routers and switches that composed your topology. If you had an application that demanded fast response – especially in financial services, where milliseconds can literally make the difference between transaction success or failure – you simply looked to beef up the network until you achieved the desired run-rate.

It’s a lot less simple in the age of the Web. By its very nature a massively distributed ‘network of networks’ using all manner of connectivity options, the public Internet is not going to cut the

mustard for the kind of quality of service most enterprise apps demand. If you could basically write an equation to deliver latency expectation by mapping signal time between router hops when you owned all the routers, imagine trying to do the same if possibly hundreds of routers, none of which you might have access to, make up the network you’re now using.

But can’t we expect a superior level of service from hybrid or private cloud, where more of the infrastructure is custom-built and SLAs (service level agreements) are in place to guarantee desired speed? Alas, it’s not that simple. Packet delays can and do occur all over the map here, even in private cloud, due to architecture choices (use of virtualisation), what’s been politely characterised as the ‘evasiveness’ of cloud service providers as to the specifics of the performance profile you are actually going to get on a daily basis, a lack of specific network management tools for IP-based networks and so on.

The ‘net’ result (if you’ll pardon the bad pun): cloud is dismissed by most CIOs as anything like a serious delivery option for mission-critical systems, certainly for the time being. But we posed the question, why would this be an issue for cloud customers? It’s not like there’s been a mass desertion of the approach, after all.

The simple answer is that it hasn’t probably cropped up yet. Many

Don’t Let Latency Derail Your Cloud Ambitions If you have only put minor services out on the cloud yet, you may not have started to worry about latency yet – but when you do hear about it, chances are it will make you pause about further investment. TelecityGroup says that technology already exists that means you don’t have to – as it will make latency as weak an anti-cloud argument as ‘security’

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organisations are happy to commit lower-criticality applications to the cloud, after all. You probably do it yourself without even really noticing: you probably deploy email spam filtering, where you happily contract with a third-party to provide scanning of their incoming electronic mail - not caring where it is based or how delivered, so long as the filtering gets done.

But that’s a prime example, says David Hall, Commercial & Strategy Manager at Internet experts TelecityGroup, of a low-latency application: as CIO, you are not putting many critical eggs into any kind of a cloud basket. “Most organisations are comfortable with using a cloud-based service of this level as email is not expected to be real-time - and so some time delay in the network is really almost irrelevant.”

And while organisations might be comfortable to look at putting email itself - perhaps using an Office365 cloud approach from Microsoft - into the cloud, they are much less convinced that systems that need sub-second responses back could be safely hosted in the public cloud as it now stands.

Unless there’s some revolutionary second generation of Internet technology, then, public cloud looks destined to remain a minority sport for most enterprises, though presumably bad latency isn’t that much of an issue for consumers. (This becomes less of a barrier to public cloud if you

are working with a service provider that will offer you use of its own network, of course.)

That is in fact pretty much how things stood until a company you might have heard of called Amazon decided to see if bad cloud latency could be better dealt with.

True cloud service transparency In 2011 Amazon, a major player in public cloud, of course, with its AWS (Amazon Web Services) service, announced something called Direct Connect. The technology allows you as the customer to skip over the entire public Internet and hook up a direct private network

If bad latency means you are too late to make a sale or a buy if you’re a City firm, game over.

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connection from your building or data centre to Amazon’s cloud. And Amazon is already convincing a lot of people that this could be a great way to curb latency problems by providing a consistent, predictable level of network performance, with the user being able to set rules for what sort of traffic gets prioritised.

For TelecityGroup’s Hall, “AWS Direct Connect means you can know exactly what performance you will get, what data centre is being used, what location – all the information you need to plan exactly what applications could use that network speed, in other words. This takes away at a stroke a lot of the issues that CIOs say they have with the cloud, as they can inspect what’s actually going on. It also means that you can get the level of connectivity you feel appropriate and most suitable, which means you can start exploiting a lot more of the Cloud’s

attractive features beyond just using it for low-level stuff like your email filtering.

“If you’ve been holding back from looking at the public cloud because of the latency issue, technologies like Direct Connect have started to open the door and remove the barriers,” he adds.

As it turns out, TelecityGroup itself has decided to step in and follow the Direct Connect lead (the company is also a European partner firm for the AWS solution, incidentally). Step forward what seems like a very promising technology: its own ‘Cloud-IX’ platform.

Cloud-IX – the cloud-neutral ‘ecosystem’ Towards the end of last year TelecityGroup announced technology that will beat the network complexity and latency issue in the shape of its ‘cloud-neutral’ solution, Cloud-IX.

The idea is to offer direct connectivity for customers that want to work with such cloud platforms as Amazon Web Services, virtualization giant VMware’s global cloud provider of the year, iland, CSC’s cloud offering, as well as those of Fujitsu and UK cloud computing and unified communications player Outsourcery.

Cloud-IX has taken up the AWS Direct Connect baton, then, with its promise to help customers maximise the efficiency, flexibility and security of their hybrid cloud endeavours by establishing dedicated network connections from their private or managed infrastructure into any of these premier level cloud providers.

The technology will also help CIOs make properly informed choices around the deployment of their applications, without restrictions due to data sovereignty or vendor lock-in. And by integrating hybrid structures with the cloud providers of your choice, Cloud-IX will allow data centre managers to seamlessly connect to and between a

TelecityGroup has announced technology that will beat the network complexity and latency issue – Cloud-IX.

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range of cloud partners, physical infrastructure and networks, all as part of the carrier-neutral data centre providers own digital ‘ecosystem.’

At the time of the Cloud-IX announcement TelecityGroup’s CEO, Michel Tobin, commented, “Cloud-IX [combines] premium carrier neutral data centres to house existing mission-critical infrastructure with access to the key global cloud platforms.”

That’s going to be of great interest, he added, to any European enterprise in any vertical sector that’s been struggling with working out how to maximise the power of the cloud to enhance the performance of their core platforms, manage big data and deliver what he frames as “enhanced and scalable service offerings:” “Key to solving this challenge is building flexible solutions that utilise the elasticity and economic benefits of the public cloud alongside existing IT infrastructure, all with direct connectivity into local and international carriers.”

Sounds very promising. But can Cloud-IX deliver – and could it indeed be the way to leapfrog the latency barrier that could stop more organisations make anything more than a token step into using the power of cloud?

Direct cloud connection – in action The answer seems to be yes, judging by the highly suggestive experience of a beta customer of Cloud-IX - a leading City of London based wealth management group.

The organsiation, which has asked for confidentiality as to its identity due to the competitive advantage it says it’s reaping from the system, is building out a hybrid cloud in two TelecityGroup UK data centres that it is convinced will allow it to drive internal efficiencies by delivering essential business applications quickly, reliably and to-scale.

What part does Cloud-IX play in delivering on that vision? The company

in question is deploying the system to port more than 100 of its core business applications, ranging from customer relationship management (CRM), all of its desktop apps and email, over into the Amazon Web Services cloud.

As a result, it’s achieving a whopping 20 times bandwidth compared with its previous architecture, when its IT infrastructure was connected to AWS via the public Web alone.

And as for latency? That has been cut by over 50% - a very impressive step-up in delivery time compared to just using the common or garden Internet, patently. Key to making the solution work is the consistent latency experience (jitter) delivered by Cloud-IX.

The speed of delivery and scalability that this FTSE 250 organisation is getting from the power of a direct connection into AWS, it confirms, means that its business is able to provision IT workloads on demand without ever running over-inflated operational costs.

And it’s an approach that is also increasing the reliability and resilience of its business applications overall, which means its team can work that more efficiency. “Utilising AWS’s Public Cloud with TelecityGroup allows us to achieve the most effective and efficient

connection between our private infrastructure and Amazon’s public cloud,” the company told CBR.

Time to take cloud seriously – at last? Examples like this early Cloud-IX customer’s success spell out one clear message to TelecityGroup’s Hall: it’s time to stop letting vague worries like ‘security’ impair your company’s ability to fully exploit highly-promising options such as hybrid or public cloud.

“I worry that too many CIOs I talk to use the word ‘security’ to mean ‘I don’t want to lose control,’” he states.

“In many ways, companies like Google or Amazon, the kind of people you’d want to work with in the cloud, have more security experts on the payroll than you do anyway.

“The door that Direct Connect has opened and Cloud-IX is opening further now needs to be pushed open – allowing you to plan for which applications are right for being delivered over the cloud so that you can start saving cost, achieve greater flexibility and functionality and let you, as the organisation’s IT leader, focus on the real value-add stuff, not the plumbing.”

Could it be time for latency to stop holding back your cloud ambitions?

It’s definitely starting to seem that way.

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