Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Performance Evaluation Framework
of Cloud Platforms
Amazon, Microsoft and Google are investing billions of dollars in building
distributed data centers across different continents around the world providing
cloud computing resources to their customers. In practice, a typical cloud platform
includes a cloud application hosting server in addition to a cloud-hosted data
storage service. Many cloud service provides also offer additional services such as
customizable load balancing and monitoring tools. In this chapter, we focus on the
following three cloud platforms:
Amazon offers a collection of services, called
Amazon Web Services
, which
includes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as cloud hosting server, offering
infrastructure as a service, Amazon SimpleDB and Simple Storage Service (S3)
as cloud databases.
Microsoft Azure
is recognized as a combination of infrastructure as a service and
platform as a service. It features
web role
and
worker role
for web hosting tasks
and computing tasks, respectively. It also offers a variety of database options
including Windows Azure Table Storage and Windows Azure Blob Storage as the
NoSQL database options, and Azure SQL Database as the relational database
option.
Google App Engin
e supports a platform as a service model, supporting program-
ming languages including Python and Java, and Google App Engine Datastore
as a Bigtable-based [
99
], non-relational and highly shardable cloud database.
There have been a number of research efforts that specifically evaluate the
Amazon cloud platform [
130
,
152
]. However, there has been little in-depth eval-
uation research conducted on other cloud platforms, such as Google App Engine
and Microsoft Windows Azure. More importantly, these work lack a more generic
evaluation method that enables a fair comparison between various cloud platforms.
