Take some advice … Trust but Verify ( Доверяй, но проверяй)

Hidden inside the cloud is the possibility that what you end up with is not what you started with.  This can be accidental, or may be a deliberate move by the service provider.

For example, one of the great positive aspects of cloud-based services is the guarantee of high-availability.  Failover servers, virtual servers, shared storage, parallel networks etc are all there to provide immediate switching in case your native server stops. But there’s no way to guarantee that the new server, network or drive that kicks in to replace it has the same performance characteristics as the one you are used to.  The first sign of a problem will be complaints from your users of delays in responses, like idle times waiting for a screen to display.  Equally, there’s no guarantee that when the problem that switched you out of the original service is repaired (if it’s ever repaired), you will be switched back on to it.

To keep you on top of the situation, you need a strong monitoring service that keeps track of the performance of every aspect of the physical and operations environment.  AimBetter does this for you, tracking over 400 metrics of server behavior, and just as importantly, in the case of cloud-based services, reports on changes in the infrastructure when they occur.  If you’ve been switched over to a different server – AimBetter will alert you.  If there’s a degradation in network speed or bandwidth – AimBetter will alert you.  If switching to different storage impacts on speed and capacity – AimBetter will alert you.

Don’t just rely on your cloud-service providers’ promises – trust … but verify – with AimBetter.