A Comparative Study on I/O Performance between Compute and Storage Optimized Instances of Amazon EC2

Abstract

Cloud computing infrastructure helps users to minimize cost by outsourcing data and computation on-demand. Due to the varying user needs in terms of computation power, storage capacity, etc., cloud providers offer various machines to choose from, to maximize the intended need. In this paper, we disprove several common conceptions regarding the performance and cost of cloud by experimenting on instances of two different families (compute and storage optimized) of the most popular cloud platform, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Our analysis shows the interesting finding that, for the machines of the same configuration, storage optimized instances have lower disk read-write speed than compute optimized, which does not completely reflect the claim made by Amazon in all cases. Additionally, storage optimized instances have notable performance difference among them. We also identify that the I/O performance of same instance type varies over different time periods.