Virtual machine performance comparison of public IaaS providers in China

We compare the virtual machine (VM) performance of two public IaaS providers in China (GrandCloud and Aliyun). UnixBench and Hadoop wordcount are utilized to provide benchmark data for the comparison. It is found that VM specifications such as the number of CPU cores and the amount of memory can no longer be used as reference for VM performance. In both UnixBench and Hadoop wordcount tests, as the VM gets bigger, the performance / price ratio gets lower. In Hadoop wordcount tests, a cluster with several smaller VM's provides much better performance as performance / price ratio as compared to a bigger VM. It is recommended to practice horizontal scaling when an application needs more computing resource.