Connecting the Dots

Part I of this book considered the resource facing service impairments introduced by virtualization and cloud that risk degrading the customer facing service offered by cloud-based applications. Part II analyzed those risks, and Part III offered recommendations to mitigate the end user service impact of those risks. This chapter summarizes the key points from these three parts. It discusses application service quality challenge, four redundancy models, and designs for scalability, extensibility, and failure. The chapter elucidates the actions recommended to assure the feasibility and likelihood of cloud-based applications consistently achieving their service quality expectations. A section considers the challenge of taking an existing or traditional application that is successfully deployed on native hardware configurations to cloud while continuing to deliver at least comparable service quality to end users. This book methodically delineates and analyzes the risks, and offers concrete recommendations to enable applications deployed to cloud to deliver service quality.