Benchmarking the Cloud in a simple and effective way

Benchmarking is a well-known and extensively used technique for assessing and comparing performance of systems. Applying benchmarking to Cloud services creates new opportunities to make a more efficient usage of the Cloud and save costs. In fact, performance of Cloud resources heavily affects the performance of the applications running in the Cloud. Knowing the resources performance is a factor to take into consideration to estimate the costs to sustain in order to guarantee the desired application Quality of Service.

Performance can sensibly vary from Cloud to Cloud and it is difficult to make comparisons on paper because actual performance depends on factors like the hardware equipment of the Cloud infrastructure, resources co-location and the configuration of the assigned resources. Unfortunately, most of this information is not disclosed by Cloud Providers. For this reason, running independent benchmarking tests remains the most reliable way of comparing performance of different Cloud Providers.

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