The Performance of Clouds

A CloudOps white paper on the performance of cloud computing platforms

Cloud computing is a significant shift in the way companies build and run IT resources. It promises pay-as-you-go economics and elastic capacity. Every major change in IT forces IT professionals to “rebalance” their application strategy—just look at client-server computing, the web, or mobile devices. Today, cloud computing is prompting a similar reconsidering of IT strategy.

Performance monitoring firm Webmetrics approached us to write a study on cloud performance. We decided to assess several cloud platforms, across several dimensions, using Webmetrics’ testing services to collect performance data.

In this paper you will learn:

• The state of web performance and cloud computing.
• Cloud computing terminology.
• The big questions to ask when testing clouds.
• A testing methodology for the evaluation of cloud platforms.
• Test agent code that you can use for your own testing.
• Guidelines for how test various cloud platforms yourself.
• Our own testing results for several different clouds.