Let Latency Guide You: Towards Characterization of Cloud Application Performance

Public cloud infrastructures provide flexible hosting for web application providers, but the rented virtual machines (VMs) often offer unpredictable performance to the deployed applications. Understanding cloud performance is challenging for application providers, as clouds provide limited information that would help them have expectations about their application performance. In this paper we present a technique to measure the performance of cloud applications, based on observations of the application latency. We treat the cloud application as a black box, making no assumption about the underlying platform. From our measurements, we can observe the varying performance provided by the different VM profiles across well-known commercial cloud platforms. We also identify a trade-off between the responsiveness and the load of the measured servers, which can help application providers in their deployment and provisioning.