Migrating applications to the cloud can be a costly and time-consuming proposition. Crosscheck Networks is attempting to help developers abate common impediments with CloudPort, a new product that simulates production conditions on multiple providers.

The company was motivated to create CloudPort through its own experience in determining whether to migrate applications from its data center to a private or public cloud, said CEO Mamoon Yunus.

A developer can also validate integrations while eliminating QA software and hardware costs, according to the company.

Pricing for CloudPort starts at US$4,999; pricing includes costs passed on from cloud providers. It will be available for purchase on April 5.

The product builds cloud instances in Amazon EC2, GoGrid, OpSource Cloud and Rackspace. It emulates calls from Web services and middleware, and then collects performance metrics on geographic latency and service initiation/“spin-up” times; failures, outages and application error states; and security, capacity and interoperability.

When Crosscheck ran its simulation, it learned that application performance profiles changed during times of the day on public clouds due to multi-tenancy, Yunus said. A developer can learn whether an application may require its own dedicated device, which affects cost margins, he added.