An Intra-Cloud Networking Performance Evaluation on CloudStack Environment

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is a cloud on-demand commodity built on top of virtualization technologies and managed by IaaS tools. In this scenario, performance is a relevant matter because a set of aspects may impact and increase the system overhead. Specific on the network, the use of virtualized capabilities may cause performance degradation (eg.,latency, throughput). The goal of this paper is to contribute to networking performance evaluation, providing new insights for private IaaS clouds. To achieve our goal, we deploy CloudStack environments and conduct experiments with different configurations and techniques. The research findings demonstrate that KVM-based cloud instances have small network performance degradation regarding throughput (about 0.2% for coarse-grained and 6.8% for fine-grained messages) while container-based instances have even better results. On the other hand, the KVM instances present worst latency (about 12.4% on coarse-grained and two times more on fine-grained messages w. r. t. native environment) and better in container-based instances, where the performance results are close to the native environment. Furthermore, we demonstrate a performance optimization of applications running on KVM.