Early Observations on the Performance of Windows Azure

Abstract

Abstract.A significant open issue in cloud computing is the real performance of the infrastructure. Few, if any, cloud providers or technologies offer quantitative performance guarantees. Regardless of the potential advantages of the cloud in comparison to enterprise-deployed applications, cloud infrastructures may ultimately fail if deployed applications cannot predictably meet behavioral requirements. In this paper, we present the results of comprehensive performance experiments we conducted on Windows Azure from October 2009 to February 2010. In general, we have observed good performance of the Windows Azure mechanisms, although the average 10 min VM startup time must be accounted for in application design. We also present performance and reliability observations and analysis from our deployment of a large-scale scientific application hosted on Azure, called ModisAzure, that show unusual and sporadic VM execution slowdown of over 4× in some cases and affected up to 16% of task executions at times. In addition to a detailed performance evaluation of Windows Azure, we provide recommendations for potential users of Windows Azure based on these early observations. Although the discussion and analysis is tailored to scientific applications, the results are broadly applicable to the range of existing and future applications running in Windows Azure.

On Network Throughput Variability in Microsoft Azure Cloud

“…Several works in literature analyzed the maximum network throughput achievable in a public-cloud environment by leveraging non-cooperative approaches [16], [15], [11], [9], [14], [12], [8]. However, only few of them analyzed the MS Azure public cloud and investigated the performance of the intra-cloud network.…”

“…However, only few of them analyzed the MS Azure public cloud and investigated the performance of the intra-cloud network. Hill et al [8] measured the TCP network throughput among 10 VMs of small size reporting throughput values ranging between 80 and 800 Mbps. They also reported great throughput variability over time between fixed VMs.…”

“…This aspect is much more awkward since the intra-cloud network proved to be a potential bottleneck for data-and computation-intensive applications [16], [17], [7], [9]. In this context, it is not surprising that measuring intra-cloud network performance has very recently attracted interest from the research community [16], [15], [11], [9], [14], [17], [12], [8]. From the pure point of view of the cloud customer, the adoption of non-cooperative approaches -that do not rely on the support of the provider -seems the only viable solution to obtain detailed information on the network performance.…”

Cloud auto-scaling with deadline and budget constraints

“…Though cloud instance acquisition requests can be made at any time and computing power can be scaled up to extremely large, it does not mean cloud scales fast. Based on our previous experiences and research [5], it could take around 10 more minutes from an instance acquisition request until it is ready to use. Moreover, such instance startup lag could keep changing over the time.…”

“…Such instance startup lag typically involves finding the right spot for the requested instances in cloud data center, downloading specified OS image, booting the virtual machine, and finishing network setup, etc. Based on our experiences and research [5], it could take as long as 10 min to start an instance in Windows Azure, and such startup lag can change over time. In other words, it's very likely that users may request instances late if they do not consider instance startup time factor.…”