Performance Analysis: Benchmarking Public Clouds

Selecting an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider can be a complex exercise that involves an array of considerations including business needs, budget, and application requirements. Buyers frequently respond to this complexity by filtering vendors based on variables that are more easily comparable, usually product features, location, and price. By contrast, performance, which is a critical factor to ensuring fit with business needs and ultimately satisfaction with the service, is often ignored. Virtual machine (VM) performance can be challenging to assess because it can vary drastically across vendors, instance sizes and prices, as well as in terms of a particular application’s unique requirements.

Internap commissioned this benchmarking analysis to examine the relative performance of major VM components including virtual cores, memory, block storage, and internal network for Internap AgileCLOUD and Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2/EBS. Specifically, the study examines raw performance and price-indexed performance for two common workloads: web servers and databases. Findings from the study show that Internap AgileCLOUD provides better raw performance and price-indexed performance than AWS.