Internap Corporation has announced the results of a Cloud Spectator report, “Performance Analysis: Benchmarking Public Clouds.” The report demonstrates significant performance advantages that can be achieved on Internap’s OpenStack-based AgileCLOUD when running configurations for Web servers and databases, compared to equivalent configurations for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

When comparing the many public clouds available from service providers, buyers have historically lacked visibility into public cloud performance, which can be critical to meeting business demands and, ultimately, delivering end user satisfaction – particularly for organizations that rely on processing performance-intensive or “fast data” workloads, such as ad tech, financial services, e-commerce and online gaming.

“Virtual machine performance can be challenging for organizations to assess because it varies drastically across vendors, instance sizes and prices, as well as in terms of a particular application’s unique requirements – making like-to-like comparisons difficult,” said Danny Gee, senior analyst at Cloud Spectator. “The results of our report highlight performance advantages on Internap’s public cloud across different configurations as compared to Amazon Web Services EC2.”

 

Cloud Spectator, “Performance Analysis: Benchmarking Public Clouds” overview and findings

To quantify the performance differential between Internap’s AgileCLOUD and AWS EC2, Cloud Spectator conducted tests of virtual processor performance, memory bandwidth, block storage IOPS and internal network throughput for the most commonly-deployed Web server and database configurations.

Key results from Cloud Spectator’s Web server test scenarios include:

  • Static Web server – Processor performance is critical for Web servers that primarily serve content to viewers, such as personal webpages, online portfolios and image galleries. Internap AgileCLOUD’s virtual processors scored approximately 50 percent higher on performance than AWS counterparts. Read IOPS, another common performance measurement relevant to static Web servers, were also examined. Internap AgileCLOUD’s disk reads sustained approximately 2,490 IOPS, while AWS sustained an average of 1,542 read IOPS.
  • Read/write Web server – Web servers that both serve content and accept user inputs often require robust read and write capabilities. Examples include blogs, media sharing websites and social media. Write performance from block storage in this scenario sustained an average of 2,500 IOPS and 1,542 IOPS on Internap and AWS, respectively. AgileCLOUD also maintained the CPU and read IOPS performance advantages described in the static Web server tests.
  • High-traffic Web server – Network throughput is a crucial performance consideration for Web servers that can serve requests concurrently on a large scale, commonly seen in applications such as news outlets, travel websites and e-commerce sites. Cloud Spectator’s tests found that network throughput was at least 5x faster on Internap AgileCLOUD in this scenario.

Key results from Cloud Spectator’s database tests include:

  • Single-node database – Cloud Spectator found that AgileCLOUD sustained at least 36 percent more memory bandwidth than AWS, allowing for faster retrieval of time-sensitive data and enabling more work to take place in any specified period of time.
  • Clustered database – Network throughput is a primary performance consideration for clustered databases, in addition to memory bandwidth, virtual processors and read/write IOPS. Cloud Spectator’s tests showed that AgileCLOUD’s internal network throughput outperformed AWS by up to 5x, depending on the vCPU configuration.
  • The Cloud Spectator report also revealed that Internap’s AgileCLOUD offered significantly better price-performance value than AWS across all five Web server and database comparisons. In the Web server tests, Internap’s AgileCLOUD achieved price-performance scores that were up to 3.4x higher than the scores for AWS, depending on the Web server configuration. In the database tests, AgileCLOUD’s price-performance scores were up to 2.7x higher than the scores for AWS, depending on the database configuration.

“The Cloud Spectator benchmarks provide further validation of both the sheer performance and overall price-performance of Internap’s AgileCLOUD in comparison with commodity public cloud providers,” said Satish Hemachandran, senior vice president and general manager, cloud and hosting, at Internap. “These results, combined with the superior scores shown in previous AgileSERVER bare metal benchmarks, demonstrate Internap’s continued ability to provide hosted environments that deliver exceptional performance for mission-critical applications.”

Internap’s AgileCLOUD is a highly scalable public cloud that is optimized for performance- and data-centric workloads and industries, such as real-time analytics, mobile, ad tech and e-commerce, among others. AgileCLOUD customers also have access to the native OpenStack API, which allows them to avoid vendor lock-in and move workloads between disparate cloud environments with minimal development effort. Internap offers its OpenStack-powered public cloud across a global footprint of data centers in Dallas, Secaucus, New Jersey, Montreal and Amsterdam. Customers can seamlessly hybridize AgileCLOUD with bare-metal servers, as well as colocation and managed hosting environments to maximize performance, cost-efficiency and control for different applications and workloads.

 

This article was originally posted “Report: Internap’s OpenStack Public Cloud Is Compared To Amazon Web Services EC2” from Cloud Strategy Magazine.