System Level Benchmarking of Public Clouds

It is important for cloud users to be able to evaluate and compare different cloud services to achieve high performance and maximize cost savings. To that end, this research benchmarked Amazon web services elastic compute cloud and Rackspace cloud infrastructure and compared the results for the two public cloud providers. The intent of the study was to determine how these selected providers perform with regards to system parameter usage and hence three system-level benchmarks: STREAM, IOR, and NPB-EP were run on different configurations to provide an insight to the cloud users in selection of provider on VM clusters of 1,2,4,6, and 8 nodes. The clusters were created with similar virtual machines from both providers. The benchmarks examined bandwidth, I/O and CPU performance. A comparison of results for the two providers is presented graphically and T-test applied to determine if differences are significant. Observations were taken at multiple times at different time periods on weekdays and weekends to examine variance of cloud performance.