Analysis of Cloud-Based Applications

This chapter offers the following analysis methodologies to consider when evolving or architecting applications that will be deployed on virtualized and cloud platforms: reliability block diagrams and side-by-side analysis; IaaS impairment effects analysis; PaaS failure effects analysis; workload distribution analysis; anti-affinity analysis; and elasticity analysis. Reliability block diagrams (RBDs) are a convenient way to analyze the service availability risks and redundancy mitigations for an application. Infrastructure-as-a-Service impairment effects analysis (IIEA) identifies qualitative risks to achieving the application's service quality requirements. The chapter considers the application service impact of PaaS technology component failures through Platform-as-a-Service failure effects analysis (PFEA). Workload distribution analysis for proxy load balancers used by an application should complete service quality analysis and overload control analysis. The chapter also discusses anti-affinity analysis, release management impact, recovery point objective (RPO) analysis, and recovery time objective (RTO) analysis.