The cloud offers companies nearly every feature they need for managing their information resources: efficiency, scalability, capacity, affordability, reliability, security, and adaptability. What’s missing from this list of cloud benefits is a deal-breaker for many organizations: performance.

A growing number of firms are removing mission-critical applications from the public cloud and returning them to in-house data centers because they need speed that the cloud infrastructure doesn’t deliver. In a sponsored article on InfoWorld, HPE Cloud Group VP and Chief Engineer Gary Thome cites Dropbox as the poster child for big-name services that have turned their backs on the public cloud.

The culprit, according to Thome, is time-sharing: Public cloud services may offer unlimited capacity, but their business model relies on capping performance. That’s a problem you don’t have when you manage your data systems, which you can generally scale up to whatever performance level your apps require.

The public-cloud challenge: Accommodating apps with a low tolerance for latency

Financial systems are the principal category of applications that require instant response to user and system requests. To address public-cloud latency, Thome suggests combining containers with composable infrastructure, which pools compute, storage, and network resources and “self-assembles” dynamically based on the needs of the workload or app.

Four attributes of composable infrastructure are 1) the disaggregation of compute, memory, I/O, and storage; 2) re-aggregation (composition) and orchestration; 3) API-based automation and management, and; 4) matching apps to available resources to optimize performance. Source: Forbes

By controlling the software-defined resources programmatically via a unified API, infrastructure becomes “a single line of code” that is optimized for that specific workload, according to Thome. With the composable infrastructure approach, you lose the public cloud’s cost, efficiency, and speed benefits over on-premises data centers.

A more forward-looking approach is to address directly the causes of latency in systems hosted on the public cloud. That’s the angle taken by two relatively new technologies: software-defined WANs and availability zones.

A lingua franca for network management

SD-WANs promise simpler network monitoring by accommodating a range of connections, including MPLS, broadband, and LTE. An SD-WAN’s primary advantage is connecting between multiple cloud services and enterprise networks. The technology reduces latency by choosing the fastest path based on each network’s policies and logic. TechTarget‘s Lee Doyle writes that SD-WANs will become more popular as companies increase their use of SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Google Docs, and Microsoft Office 365.

An expensive alternative to dealing with latency on the public internet is to pay for direct interconnection, which offers direct links between multiple cloud services, telecom carriers, and enterprises. eWeek‘s Christopher Preimesberger lists seven criteria for comparing dedicated interconnection services to the public internet.

Improved performance by eliminating the public internet’s points of contention

Enhanced hybrid cloud security by maintaining control over proprietary data

Better network availability through elimination of WAN connections between data centers and the public cloud

More control over costs by avoiding contracts for a set amount of bandwidth, much of which is never used

The flexibility of accessing physical and virtual connections through a single portal

A broader choice of cloud service providers, without having to enter into individual contracts with each one

Easier collaboration with business partners by establishing dedicated links for transferring large files securely, quickly, and efficiently – without the volatility of the public internet

Morpheus: The low-latency alternative to expensive dedicated links

The Morpheus cloud application management system offers a unique approach to guaranteeing high availability for latency-sensitive applications. Jeff Wheeler explains how the Morpheus Appliance’s high-availability mode supports deployment in multi-tier environments.

All of Morpheus’s components are designed to be distributable to facilitate deployment in distributed clouds and increase uptime. A stand-alone Morpheus configuration includes several tiers: web, application, cache, message queue, search index, and database. Each of these tiers except for cache is distributable and deployable on separate servers; the cache is currently localized to each application server. A shared storage tier contains artifacts and backup objects.

Nginx is used as a reverse proxy for the application tier, as well as for access to the localized package repository required for deploying data nodes and VMs. Source: Morpheus

For optimal performance, avoid crossing WAN boundaries with high latency links. In all other situations, external services can be configured in any cloud provider, on-premises cloud/data center, or virtual environment. The external load balancer that routes requests to a pool of web/app servers can be set to connect to each server via TLS to simplify configuration, but the balancer also supports non-TLS mode to support SSL offloading.

How edge networks increase rather than reduce the strain on cloud bandwidth

Peter Levine, an analyst for Andreessen Horowitz, raised a lot of eyebrows last December with his presentation explaining why he believed cloud computing would soon be replaced by edge networks. Levine reasons that the devices we use every day will soon generate too much data to be accommodated by existing network bandwidth. The only way to make the burgeoning Internet of Things practical is by moving storage and processing to the edge of the network, where the data is initially collected.

There’s one element of edge networks Levine fails to address: management. Dan Draper of the financial services firm Vertiv writes in an April 17, 2017, article on Data Center Frontier that edge networks place data and processing in locations that IT departments can’t access easily. Depending on the system, there could be thousands or even millions of such remote data points in a typical enterprise network.

According to Draper, the solution to the bandwidth demands of IoT is the creation of an integrated infrastructure. Network nodes will be like those nested Russian dolls, or “matryoshkas,” scaling from smart sensors monitoring sewer lines and similar inaccessible spots, all the way up to public cloud installations processing terabytes of data in the blink of an eye.

Draper points out two requirements for such an integrated infrastructure that remain works in progress: enhanced remote monitoring and power management. Services such as the Morpheus cloud application management system give companies a leg up by preparing them for “cloud” computing that extends all the way to the four corners of the earth.