An Empirical Performance Analysis Of IaaS Clouds With CloudStone Web 2.0 Benchmarking Tool

Web 2.0 applications have become ubiquitous over the past few years because they provide useful features such as a rich, responsive graphical user interface that supports interactive and dynamic content. Social networking websites, blogs, auctions, online banking, online shopping and video sharing websites are noteworthy examples of Web 2.0 applications. The market for public cloud service providers is growing rapidly, and cloud providers offer an ever-growing list of services. As a result, developers and researchers find it challenging when deciding which public cloud service to use for deploying, experimenting or testing Web 2.0 applications. This study compares the scalability and performance of a social-events calendar application on two Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud services – Amazon EC2 and HP Cloud. This study captures and compares metrics on three different instance configurations for each cloud service such as the number of concurrent users (load), as well as response time and throughput (performance). Additionally, the total price of the three different instance configurations for each cloud service is calculated and compared. This comparison of the scalability, performance and price metrics provides developers and researchers with an insight into the scalability and performance characteristics of the three instance configurations for each cloud service, which simplifies the process of determining which cloud service and instance configuration to use for deploying their Web 2.0 applications. This study uses CloudStone – an open-source, three-tier web application benchmarking tool that simulates Web 2.0 application activities – as a realistic workload generator and to capture the intended metrics. The comparison of the collected metrics indicate that all of the tested Amazon EC2 instance configurations provide better scalability and lower latency at a lower cost than the respective HP Cloud instance configurations; however, the tested HP Cloud instance configurations provide a greater storage capacity than the Amazon EC2 instance configurations, which is an important consideration for data-intensive Web 2.0 applications

On Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services: A Systematic Review

Background: Cloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. Aim: To facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. Method: Based on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. Results: This SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially represent the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. Conclusions: Evaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., the Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and reveals new Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) lessons

On a Catalogue of Metrics for Evaluating Commercial Cloud Services

Given the continually increasing amount of commercial Cloud services in the market, evaluation of different services plays a significant role in cost-benefit analysis or decision making for choosing Cloud Computing. In particular, employing suitable metrics is essential in evaluation implementations. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is not any systematic discussion about metrics for evaluating Cloud services. By using the method of Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we have collected the de facto metrics adopted in the existing Cloud services evaluation work. The collected metrics were arranged following different Cloud service features to be evaluated, which essentially constructed an evaluation metrics catalogue, as shown in this paper. This metrics catalogue can be used to facilitate the future practice and research in the area of Cloud services evaluation. Moreover, considering metrics selection is a prerequisite of benchmark selection in evaluation implementations, this work also supplements the existing research in benchmarking the commercial Cloud services.Comment: 10 pages, Proceedings of the 13th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Grid Computing (Grid 2012), pp. 164-173, Beijing, China, September 20-23, 201

A Cloud Benchmark Suite Combining Micro and Applications Benchmarks

Micro and application performance benchmarks are commonly used to guide cloud service selection. However, they are often considered in isolation in a hardly reproducible setup with a flawed execution strategy. This paper presents a new execution methodology that combines micro and application benchmarks into a benchmark suite called RMIT Combined, integrates this suite into an automated cloud benchmarking environment, and implements a repeatable execution strategy. Additionally, a newly crafted Web serving benchmark called WPBench with three different load scenarios is contributed. A case study in the Amazon EC2 cloud demonstrates that choosing a cost-efficient instance type can deliver up to 40% better performance with 40% lower costs at the same time for the Web serving benchmark WPBench. Contrary to prior research, our findings reveal that network performance does not vary relevantly anymore. Our results also show that choosing a modern type of virtualization can improve disk utilization up to 10% for I/O-heavy workloads

A Framework for Verifying Scalability and Performance of Cloud Based Web Applications

Antud magistritöö uurib võimalusi, kuidas kasutada veebirakendust MediaWiki, mida kasutatakse Wikipedia rakendamiseks, ja kuidas kasutada antud teenust mitme serveri peal nii, et see oleks kõige optimaalsem ja samas kõik veebikülastajad saaks teenusele ligi mõistliku ajaga. Amazon küsib raha pilves toimivate masinate ajalise kasutamise eest, ümardades pooleldi kasutatud tunnid täistundideks. Antud töö sisaldab vahendeid kuidas mõõta pilves olevate serverite jõudlust ning võimekust ja skaleerida antud veebirakendust. Amazon EC2 pilvesüsteemis on võimalik kasutajatel koostada virtuaalseid tõmmiseid operatsiooni süsteemidest, mida saab pilves rakendada XEN virtualiseerimise keskkonnas, kui eraldiseisvat serverit. Antud virtuaalse tõmmise peale sai paigaldatud tööks vaja minev keskkond, et koguda andmeid serverite kasutuse kohta ja võimaldada platvormi, mis lubab dünaamiliselt ajas lisada servereid ja eemaldada neid. Magistritöö uurib Amazon EC2 pilvesüsteemi kasutusvõimalusi, mille hulka kuulub Auto Scale, mis aitab skaleerida pilves kasutatavaid rakendusi horisontaalselt. Amazon pilve kasutatakse antud töös MediaWiki seadistamiseks ja suuremahuliste eksperimentide rakendamiseks. Vajalik on teha palju optimiseerimisi ja seadistamisi, et suurendada teenuse läbilaske võimsust. Antud töö raames loodud raamistik aitab mõõta serverite kasutust, kogudes andmeid protsessori, mälu ja võrgu kasutamise kohta. See aitab leida süsteemis olevaid kitsaskohti, mis võivad põhjustada süsteemi olulist aeglustumist. Antud töö raames sai tehtud erinevaid teste, et selgitada välja parim võimalik paigutus ja seadistus. Saavutatud seadistust kontrolliti hiljem 2 suuremahulise eksperimentiga, mis kestis üks päev ja mille käigus tekitati 22 miljonit päringut, leidmaks kuidas raamistik võimaldab teenust pilves skaleerida ülesse päringute arvu tõusmisel ja vähendada servereid, kui päringute arv väheneb. Ühes eksperimendis kasutati optimaalset heuristikat, et selgitada välja optimaalne serverite arv, mida on vaja pilves rakendada. Teine eksperimentidest kasutas Amazon Auto Scale teenust, mis kasutas serverite keskmist protsessori kasutamist, et selgitada välja, kas pilves on vaja servereid lisada või eemaldada. Antud eksperimendid näitavad selgelt, et kasutades dünaamilist arvu servereid, olenevalt päringute arvust, on võimalik teenuse üleval hoidmiseks säästa raha.Network usage and bandwidth speeds have increased massively and vast majority of people are using Internet on daily bases. This has increased CPU utilization on servers meaning that sites with large visits are using hundreds of computers to accommodate increasing traffic rates to the services. Making plans for hardware ordering to upgrade old servers or to add new servers is not a straightforward process and has to be carefully considered. There is a need to predict traffic rate for future usage. Buying too many servers can mean revenue loss and buying too few servers can result in losing clients. To overcome this problem, it is wise to consider moving services into virtual cloud and make server provisioning as an automatic step. One of the popular cloud service providers, Amazon is giving possibility to use large amounts of computing power for running servers in virtual environment with single click. They are providing services to provision as many servers as needed to run, depending how loaded the servers are and whatever we need to do, to add new servers or to remove existing ones. This will eliminate problems associated with ordering new hardware. Adding new servers is an automatic process and will follow the demand, like adding more servers for peak hours and removing unnecessary servers at night or when the traffic is low. Customer pays only for the used resources on the cloud. This thesis focuses on setting up a testbed for the cloud that will run web application, which will be scaled horizontally (by replicating already running servers) and will use the benchmark tool for stressing out the web application, by simulating huge number of concurrent requests and proper load-balancing mechanisms. This study gives us a proper picture how servers in the cloud are scaled and whole process remains transparent for the end user, as it sees the web application as one server. In conclusion, the framework is helpful in analyzing the performance of cloud based applications, in several of our research activities

Estimating Cloud Application Performance Based on Micro-Benchmark Profiling

The continuing growth of the cloud computing market has led to an unprecedented diversity of cloud services. To support service selection, micro-benchmarks are commonly used to identify the best performing cloud service. However, it remains unclear how relevant these synthetic micro-benchmarks are for gaining insights into the performance of real-world applications.Therefore, this paper develops a cloud benchmarking methodology that uses micro-benchmarks to profile applications and subsequently predicts how an application performs on a wide range of cloud services. A study with a real cloud provider (Amazon EC2) has been conducted to quantitatively evaluate the estimation model with 38 metrics from 23 micro-benchmarks and 2 applications from different domains. The results reveal remarkably low variability in cloud service performance and show that selected micro-benchmarks can estimate the duration of a scientific computing application with a relative error of less than 10% and the response time of a Web serving application with a relative error between 10% and 20%. In conclusion, this paper emphasizes the importance of cloud benchmarking by substantiating the suitability of micro-benchmarks for estimating application performance in comparison to common baselines but also highlights that only selected micro-benchmarks are relevant to estimate the performance of a particular application

Cloud Computing Trace Characterization and Synthetic Workload Generation

This thesis researches cloud computing workload characteristics and synthetic workload generation. A heuristic presented in the work guides the process of workload trace characterization and synthetic workload generation. Analysis of a cloud trace provides insight into client request behaviors and statistical parameters. A versatile workload generation tool creates client connections, controls request rates, defines number of jobs, produces tasks within each job, and manages task durations. The test system consists of multiple clients creating workloads and a server receiving request, all contained within a virtual machine environment. Statistical analysis verifies the synthetic workload experimental results are consistent with real workload behaviors and characteristics

A Factor Framework for Experimental Design for Performance Evaluation of Commercial Cloud Services

Given the diversity of commercial Cloud services, performance evaluations of candidate services would be crucial and beneficial for both service customers (e.g. cost-benefit analysis) and providers (e.g. direction of service improvement). Before an evaluation implementation, the selection of suitable factors (also called parameters or variables) plays a prerequisite role in designing evaluation experiments. However, there seems a lack of systematic approaches to factor selection for Cloud services performance evaluation. In other words, evaluators randomly and intuitively concerned experimental factors in most of the existing evaluation studies. Based on our previous taxonomy and modeling work, this paper proposes a factor framework for experimental design for performance evaluation of commercial Cloud services. This framework capsules the state-of-the-practice of performance evaluation factors that people currently take into account in the Cloud Computing domain, and in turn can help facilitate designing new experiments for evaluating Cloud services.Comment: 8 pages, Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing Technology and Science (CloudCom 2012), pp. 169-176, Taipei, Taiwan, December 03-06, 201

Patterns in the Chaos - a Study of Performance Variation and Predictability in Public IaaS Clouds

Benchmarking the performance of public cloud providers is a common research topic. Previous research has already extensively evaluated the performance of different cloud platforms for different use cases, and under different constraints and experiment setups. In this paper, we present a principled, large-scale literature review to collect and codify existing research regarding the predictability of performance in public Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. We formulate 15 hypotheses relating to the nature of performance variations in IaaS systems, to the factors of influence of performance variations, and how to compare different instance types. In a second step, we conduct extensive real-life experimentation on Amazon EC2 and Google Compute Engine to empirically validate those hypotheses. At the time of our research, performance in EC2 was substantially less predictable than in GCE. Further, we show that hardware heterogeneity is in practice less prevalent than anticipated by earlier research, while multi-tenancy has a dramatic impact on performance and predictability