Estimating Cloud Application Performance Based on Micro-Benchmark Profiling

The continuing growth of the cloud computing market has led to an unprecedented diversity of cloud services. To support service selection, micro-benchmarks are commonly used to identify the best performing cloud service. However, it remains unclear how relevant these synthetic micro-benchmarks are for gaining insights into the performance of real-world applications. Therefore, this paper develops a cloud benchmarking methodology that uses micro-benchmarks to profile applications and subsequently predicts how an application performs on a wide range of cloud services. A study with a real cloud provider (Amazon EC2) has been conducted to quantitatively evaluate the estimation model with 38 metrics from 23 micro-benchmarks and 2 applications from different domains. The results reveal remarkably low variability in cloud service performance and show that selected micro-benchmarks can estimate the duration of a scientific computing application with a relative error of less than 10% and the response time of a Web serving application with a relative error between 10% and 20%. In conclusion, this paper emphasizes the importance of cloud benchmarking by substantiating the suitability of micro-benchmarks for estimating application performance in comparison to common baselines but also highlights that only selected micro-benchmarks are relevant to estimate the performance of a particular application.