Performance Comparison Study of Clusters on Public Clouds

Abstract: As cloud computing has become the more popular choice to host clusters in recent times there are multiple providers that offer their services to the public such as Amazon web services, Google cloud platform and Microsoft Azure. The decision of cluster provider is not only a decision of provider, it is also an indirect decision of cluster infrastructure. The indirect choice of infrastructure makes it important to consider any potential differences in cluster performance caused by the infrastructure in combination with the workload type, but also the cost of the infrastructure on the available public cloud providers. To evaluate whether or not there are any significant differences in either cluster cost or performance between the available public cloud providers, a performance comparison study was conducted. The study consisted of multiple clusters hosted on Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform. The clusters had access to five different instance types that each correspond to a specific number of available cores, amount of memory and storage. All clusters executed a CPU intensive, I/O intensive, and MapReduce workload while simultaneously having its performance monitored with regard to CPU, memory, and disk usage. The performance comparison study revealed that there are significant performance differences between clusters hosted on Amazon web services and Google cloud platform for the chosen workload types. Since there are significant differences it can be concluded that the choice of provider is crucial as it impacts the cluster performance. Comparing the selected instance types against each other with regard to performance and cost, reveals that a subset of them have better performance as well as lower cost. The instance types that is not a part of this subset, have either better performance or lower cost than its counterpart on the other provider.