How predictable is the performance of IaaS instances? Some insights from benchmarking
Channel: CH Open
Date: 2016-07-16

Philipp Leitner, Senior Research Associate, University of Zurich
"How predictable is the performance of IaaS instances? Some insights from benchmarking  EC2, GCE, Azure, and Softlayer."
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Public  IaaS  cloud  providers  are  notoriously  vague  when  specifying  what  perfor-
mance  users  can  expect  from  their  various  instance  types  (see  for  instance  Ama-
zon’s  legendary  ‘medium  network  performance’).  What  is  even  worse  is  that  per-
formance is often also highly unpredictable - the same instance type might be fast 
or  slow,  depending  on  what  an  instance’s  ‘neighbours’  on  the  same  rack  or  net-
work segment are doing. This makes capacity planning in IaaS clouds a challeng-
ing problem for users, often requiring substantial overpayment just to stay ‘on the 
safe side’. In this talk I will go over the fundamental reasons behind these effects 
(hardware  heterogeneity  and  multi-tenancy),  discuss  concrete  numbers  for  four  
big  providers  (EC2,  GCE,  Azure,  and  Softlayer),  and  explain  fundamental  mitiga-
tion strategies.
Dr. Philipp Leitner is a Senior Research Associate at the Software Architecture and Evo
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lution Lab in the University of Zurich. Dr. Leitner holds a PhD degree from Vienna Uni-
versity of Technology, and leads a team working to understand how and why software 
developers use cloud systems, and to support them with better methods, techniques, 
and tools for cloud development, deployment and debugging. 
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The Open Cloud Day 2016 is all about promoting open cloud technologies and the interoperability of clouds. We aim to bring together the companies and academic institutions and deepen the understanding of the latest trends and technologies in cloud computing.

On this day we bring together another important event in the area of Cloud Computing: the SDN Workshop! This is a joint activity between the Service Engineering Research Group of the ZHAW and SWITCH. The SDN Switzerland group meets biannually to promote and share knowledge and implement new applications in the area of Software Defined Networking in the cloud. The workshop allows a full picture of ICT approaches, industry solutions, innovations and research results on SDN. The group is mainly represented by Swiss entities however, research labs from around the world are invited and represented.