The “noisy neighbor” phenomenon is something that comes up every once in a while when public clouds are discussed. TechTarget defines “noisy neighbor” as the idea that since resources are shared on public platforms, your “neighbors” (or other enterprises that are using this platform) can cause your performance to suffer.
Phenomenon or myth?
The idea of the noisy neighbor has been around in some form or another since public cloud infrastructure became a viable computing option, with tech professionals across the board warning against the “dangers” of multi-tenant cloud computing for this reason. It makes sense that something like the “noisy neighbor” phenomenon would exist. However, according to noted cloud expert David Linthicum, the noisy neighbor myth is just that – a myth. The idea that there is a finite amount of resources that tenants tap into is a common theme that comes up when public cloud is discussed, Linthicum said.
“The reality is different, as we can see as more and more applications move into their second and third years of production on public clouds,” Linthicum wrote. “You simply don’t hear of performance problems caused by contention with other cloud tenants.”
The reason these kinds of performance problems aren’t being broadcasted, Linthicum reported, is because they don’t exist. Public cloud environments provide the elasticity necessary to allocate machine instances on demand, which solves the issue of resource contention.
In the physical data center, it’s more difficult and takes longer to add servers, so the scalability of being able to quickly spin up virtual machines is critical for application performance. In fact, organizations that have moved to the public cloud sometimes find that their applications run better in those environments than they do on traditional systems.
The challenges of the physical data center make cloud computing a great option.Cloud security: Best practices
Although cloud security has long been a contested subject among cloud providers and tenants alike, the conversation is beginning to shift in favor of the cloud. In fact, clouds being inherently less secure than on-premises systems is another of those cloud computing myths along the same lines as the noisy neighbor phenomenon.
Running applications in the cloud requires the same type of security and performance monitoring that on-premises applications do. There are best practices that can be observed in order to strengthen cloud security and dispel the noisy neighbor myth. These include building cloud solutions to grow over time, along with the aforementioned performance monitoring and problem isolation.
Cloud tools you can trust
At Inspirage, we pride ourselves on the usefulness of our enterprise supply chain solutions, and that includes cloud-based solutions that depend on the Oracle cloud platform. Properly constructed enterprise solutions hosted on top public cloud platforms like Oracle don’t need to worry about noisy neighbors – and, as such, it’s never been a problem for Inspirage.
Get in touch with us today to learn more about how our cloud solutions can enhance your supply chain without having to worry about sacrificing computing power due to resource sharing.
