TCloud: A Transparent Framework for Public Cloud Service Comparison

Whilst there are many attributes that need to be considered for cloud service selection, performance remains one of the most crucial aspects. Thus, we argue for a transparent cloud provider comparison framework in this study. We initiate the development of TCloud: a transparent framework for public cloud service comparison. Our framework helps prospective cloud users to decipher public cloud benchmarking data and appraise the performance of public cloud services relative to their performance goals. We carried out experiments on the real public cloud environment to implement our framework and demonstrated how prospective cloud users can use the TCloud framework in understanding how well virtualized public cloud resources meet their application requirements. Unlike previous studies, the TCloud framework presents a more realistic method of appraising the performance of virtualized resources in the public cloud. TCloud is unique in the sense that it collates public cloud benchmarking data and correlates the observed performance metrics to prospective cloud users' actual application workload requirements.