Dave Vellante invited Vik Chaudhary, Executive VP at Keynote Systems, for an interview focused around hybrid clouds, challenges and solutions.

Vik Chaudhary is responsible for leading Keynote’s product management team and he started both his Velocity Conference keynote and his interview with a great question: How does a client know where the problem is?

The performance itself depends on a variety of factors, from the main device, the network, etc. With so many variables, where does one start? The browser? The native app? One has to be able to understand performance and how it’s travelling across the entire ecosystem, from the end-user to the infrastructure applications. Identifying the problem is the so-called “ground zero” for Chaudhary.

Vik Chaudhary encourages companies to “think big”. Exemplifying with models of companies who did just that, Vik reminded us the days when Oracle was developing data-bases. They understood these data bases needed to work with various machines and operation systems. So they wrote code to work across all these platforms. These things are even more complex today. In the consumer world, the expectations are high on usability and how fast things should be. In the IT infrastructure world, what changed was the fact that businesses and IT can be run in the cloud. This is hard to do. On one hand, the cloud simplifies things for developers by giving them access to world-class resources, but on the other hand, it raises questions regarding the security and the network issues. And things like hybrid cloud complicate things even more.

Does the hybrid cloud complicate things for DevOps?

Picking on the idea of hybrid clouds, Chaudhary said that his company is working with a number of customers that are managing data and traffic at huge scale, some of the top internet companies, and one of the trends he sees is that they are taking the physical data centers and transforming them in completely public clouds. They are using Amazon Web Services, Terremark, and other services to achieve a very fault-tolerant website. They do not need the physical infrastructure anymore, but they have to be sure, being dependent on those companies, that their website is going to remain fault-tolerant.

Injecting all those fault-tolerant domains into the system adds complexity and causes network congestions. The source code of the websites reveals all those third party services that are being added to the site. Many popular consumer websites can have up to 20 different third-party services, says Chaunhary, explaining why these websites are being slowed down.

Introspective DevOps

YouTube, Sears, 3M, Cisco, eBay — they all are customers of Keynote Systems. They are using the service to quickly understand the user experience of someone who comes to their site. They know if, where and why the site is slow, and they can fix that within minutes. They are using Keynote Systems as an early warning detection system.

Fast Identification is part of the Keynote System business value proposition. As for the performance testing, Chaudhary explains that performance testing has changed over the years. In the past, performance was always about servers. Now it’s shifting to  the user’s experience. As Google said, a blink of an eye its all it takes for the current user to make an impression of a website. For the future, Chaudhary is very excited about real user monitoring.

Speaking about the mobile trend, Chaudhary revealed that over 50 percent of the Keynote System’s revenue comes from the testing and measuring the mobile experience for the customers of the big companies already mentioned above. That is a huge shift. The market for web-performace is growing at 15 percent annually, while the one for mobile-performance and mobile-testing is growing at about 30-40 percent.