Multi-Factor Performance Comparison of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cluster and Google Cloud Platform Compute Engine

Cloud computing has rapidly become a viable competitor to on-premise infrastructure from both management and cost perspectives. This research provides insight into cluster computing performance and variability in cloud-provisioned infrastructure from two popular public cloud providers. A comparative examination of the two cloud platforms using synthetic benchmarks is provided. In this article, we compared the performance of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cluster (EC2) to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Compute Engine using three benchmarks: STREAM, IOR, and NPB-EP. Experiments were conducted on clusters with increasing nodes from one to eight. We also performed experiments over the course of two weeks where benchmarks were run at similar times. The benchmarks provided performance metrics for bandwidth (STREAM), read and write performance (IOR), and operations per second (NPB-EP). We found that EC2 outperformed GCP for bandwidth. Both provided good scalability and reliability for bandwidth with GCP showing a slight deviation during the two-week trial. GCP outperformed EC2 in both the read and write tests (IOR) as well as the operations per second test. However, GCP was extremely variable during the read and write tests over the two-week trial. Overall, each platform excelled in different benchmarks and we found EC2 to be more reliable in general.