Experimenting with Application-Based Benchmarks on Different Cloud Providers via a Multi-cloud Execution and Modeling Framework

Cloud services are emerging today as an innovative IT provisioning model, offering benefits over the traditional approach of provisioning infrastructure. However, the occurrence of multi-tenancy, virtualization and resource sharing issues raise certain difficulties in providing performance estimation during application design or deployment time. In order to assess the performance of cloud services and compare cloud offerings, cloud benchmarks are required. The aim of this paper is to present a mechanism and a benchmarking process for measuring the performance of various cloud service delivery models, while describing this information in a machine understandable format. The suggested framework is responsible for organizing the execution and may support multiple cloud providers. In our work context, benchmarking measurement results are demonstrated from three large commercial cloud providers, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Flexiant in order to assist with provisioning decisions for cloud users. Furthermore, we present approaches for measuring service performance with the usage of specialized metrics for ranking the services according to a weighted combination of cost, performance and workload.