As the race for the presidency heats up, IT leaders would do well to recall the famous catchphrase from Bill Clinton's successful 1992 campaign against George H. W. Bush: "It's the economy, stupid."

That catchphrase is important, because IT economics are important. Especially when it comes to cloud.

Application performance management (APM) for the cloud may turn out to be as much about those economics as it is about customer experience.

Consistently great experiences - but at what price?
Consistently great digital customer experiences are central to success in today's swipe-to-shop markets. If your web or mobile experiences lag, customers will abandon their transactions and might not return to try again. So snappy end-to-end application performance is a must 24x7x365.

The cloud - and PaaS such as AWS and Azure in particular - can be extremely useful for delivering those experiences. With PaaS clouds, you can quickly spin capacity up and down as necessary to maintain performance even as demand either spikes temporarily or sustains a new level of volume. This elastic capacity gives the business agility while letting it avoid high capex investments that may not be rightsized for an uncertain future.

The downside is that cloud costs can spike unexpectedly as well.

Yes, PaaS capacity can cost less than in-house capacity. And, yes, cloud cost increases will probably be somewhat offset by corresponding increases in revenue.

But unanticipated, unpredictable costs are not a financial governance best practice. Plus there's no inherent guarantee that costs will be strictly proportional to revenue. Companies with huge market cap like Facebook and Google may not have to worry about such things. But you do.

Or, to put it in James Carville's crude terms: "It's the economics, stupid."

How cloud APM helps
APM has historically served as a means of discovering or even anticipating infrastructure bottlenecks that undermine application performance. This is still true. APM is essential for safeguarding the quality of the end-user experience - whether that end-user is an employee or a customer.

But as businesses adopt cloud more broadly, infrastructure constraints become less of an issue. If CPU or storage I/O start to redline, we just spin up more. If they're underutilized, we spin them back down.

The value of APM, then, will therefore increasingly be to pinpoint the cost drivers of performance in the cloud. Which interactions are consuming capacity? Why? Are these transactions worth the cost? Should we really be writing our cloud provider a blank check to support them all?

Perhaps most important is this: Can we write our code more efficiently so we don't run our cloud bill up excessively even as we scale?

I'll write more about that last question in my next blog. But here's the point: performance and customer experience are commodities that must be purchased at the optimal price for the business to reap an optimal profit. Cloud APM can help do exactly that.

Economics matter, even in the cloud. Mastering those economics with cloud APM is the smart move.