Performance KPIs in a public cloud – what's in it for you?
As we mentioned in the previous section, performance is a tricky subject and, to put it a bit more strongly, if there's one item that will cause debates in service-level agreements, it's going to be performance. In terms of KPIs, we need to be absolutely clear about what performance is, in terms of measurable objectives.
What defines performance? It's the user experience. What about how fast an application responds and processes a request? Note that fast is not a measurable unit. A lot of us can probably relate to this: a middle-aged person may think that an app on their phone responding within 10 seconds is fast, while someone younger may be impatiently tapping their phone a second after they've clicked on something. They have a relative perception of fast. Thus, we need to define and agree on what is measurably fast. One thing to keep in mind is that without availability, there's nothing...