Measuring and characterizing the performance of interactive multi-tier cloud applications

In this paper, we conduct a detailed study characterizing the performance of multi-tier web applications on commercial cloud platforms and evaluate the potential of techniques to improve the resilience of such applications to performance fluctuations in the cloud. In contrast to prior works that have studied the performance of individual cloud services or that of compute-intensive scientific applications (e.g., map-reduce based), our study focuses on multi-tier web applications. Our work is conducted in the context of four real-world web applications which we instrumented to collect the overall response time and the time spent in each application tier, for each transaction. Our results indicate that cloud applications undergo frequent periods of poor performance that typically (i) are short-lived lasting a few minutes; and (ii) may be attributed to a small subset of application components, though different subsets may be involved at different times. While geo-distributing applications can help mitigate performance variability, coarse-grained approaches that merely choose the best performing data-center (DC) provide only modest benefits. More significant benefits could accrue, however, if combination of cloud services located across multiple datacenters (DCs) are chosen to serve each request.