Year

2017

Season

Summer

Paper Type

Master's Thesis

College

College of Computing, Engineering & Construction

Degree Name

Master of Science in Computer and Information Sciences (MS)

Department

Computing

NACO controlled Corporate Body

University of North Florida. School of Computing

First Advisor

Dr. Sanjay P. Ahuja

Second Advisor

Dr. Roger Eggen

Rights Statement

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Third Advisor

Dr. Asai Asaithambi

Department Chair

Dr. Sherif Elfayoumy

College Dean

Dr. Mark A. Tumeo

Abstract

Cloud Computing is an emerging paradigm in the field of computing where scalable IT enabled capabilities are delivered ‘as-a-service’ using Internet technology. The Cloud industry adopted three basic types of computing service models based on software level abstraction: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Infrastructure-as-a-Service allows customers to outsource fundamental computing resources such as servers, networking, storage, as well as services where the provider owns and manages the entire infrastructure. This allows customers to only pay for the resources they consume. In a fast-growing IaaS market with multiple cloud platforms offering IaaS services, the user's decision on the selection of the best IaaS platform is quite challenging. Therefore, it is very important for organizations to evaluate and compare the performance of different IaaS cloud platforms in order to minimize cost and maximize performance.

Using a vendor-neutral approach, this research focused on four of the top IaaS cloud platforms- Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, and Rackspace cloud services. This research compared the performance of IaaS cloud platforms using system-level parameters including server, file I/O, and network. System-level benchmarking provides an objective comparison of the IaaS cloud platforms from performance perspective. Unixbench, Dbench, and Iperf are the system-level benchmarks chosen to test the performance of the server, file I/O, and network respectively. In order to capture the performance variability, the benchmark tests were performed at different time periods on weekdays and weekends. Each IaaS platform's performance was also tested using various parameters. The benchmark tests conducted on different virtual machine (VM) configurations should help cloud users select the best IaaS platform for their needs. Also, based on their applications' requirements, cloud users should get a clearer picture of which VM configuration they should choose. In addition to the performance evaluation, the price-per-performance value of all the IaaS cloud platforms was also examined.

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