Wednesday, 9 April 2014

Data from the Cloud (Data, data everywhere and not a bit to use 10 of 15)









http://xkcd.com/908/

I couldn't resist starting this with a little humor.
These are the basic cloud types and the pitfalls of each when it comes to data:

Public Cloud (Worst Case)
     No control
     You put your faith in the provider
     Monitor response times only?

Private Cloud (Best Case)
     Full control
     You are responsible, but have all the data

Community Cloud (Never seen)
     Potential control
     You are involved and may have access to the data

Hybrid Cloud (Where you’re likely to be)
     Some control
     Full control of the Private Cloud portion only

Well we all know that the world is a complex place, so monitor what you can, and know the limitations of what you can’t.

What happens if you want to Benchmark the Public cloud?

The public cloud is clearly the weak link in terms of monitoring, so I thought I’d get an EC2 account, run some benchmarks and see what kind of workload we can put through this thing.

To quote Jeremy Clarkson(TopGear, UK) “How hard can it be?” 

I got a VM up and running to see what workload it could handle.The AWS results were all over the place, I couldn’t get a stable result at all. I didn’t even record the results because it was so far apart I figured it was rubbish.

I then thought 'Somebody else must have looked into this' so I went to the spec.org website to see if there was a specific “cloud” benchmark. 


Unfortunately there isn’t as yet and they have been at it a while!

A Google search turned up a paper by these guys and it matches my experience. 
IaaS Cloud Benchmarking: Approaches, Challenges, and Experience
Alexandru Iosup, Radu Prodan, and Dick Epema

As you can clearly see there are problems with benchmarking the Cloud and I'll be looking at what these are on Friday.

Phil Bell
Consultant
















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