Investigating the Impact of Deployment Configuration and User Demand on a Social Network Application in the Amazon EC2 Cloud

One of the main challenges faced by current users of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) clouds are the difficulties to estimate cloud resources according to their application needs. Even though cloud platforms are elastic and provide fast means to acquire or release resources it is important to understand the best ways to do that considering a diversity of providers with many different resource types and prices. This work reports on an experimental investigation conducted on a popular cloud benchmark based on a social network application running on top of the Amazon EC2 cloud. Our experiments aim at finding cost-effective ways to select the different EC2 resource types and deployment configurations based on the demand imposed to the application (measured in number of simultaneous users) and identify the configuration that gives the best return in terms of its cost per user.