Profiling core operations for elasticity in cloud environments

Cloud computing provides on-demand allocation and deallocation of resources via the key feature of elasticity. Although there are many choices of public and private clouds, detailed performance analysis for elasticity operations in such environments are not available. This paper compares the performance of core elasticity operations for the Amazon EC2 public cloud service with private clouds controlled by OpenNebula on top of Xen. Both public and private cloud environments are also compared against the Xen hypervisor alone. Our results show that elasticity can be provided by both cloud services with acceptable response times. We identified that EC2 is always faster than OpenNebula and sometimes even faster that our Xen setup.