Performance analysis for large IaaS clouds
IaaS clouds are major enablers of data-intensive cloud applications because they provide necessary computing capacity for managing Big Data environments. In a typical IaaS cloud, virtual machine (VM) instances deployed on physical machines (PM) are provided to the users for their computing needs. Recently, IaaS cloud providers are realizing that merely providing the basic functionalities for Big Data processing is not sufficient to survive intense business competitions. Rather, the performance of the cloud provided service is an equally important factor when a user signs up for the service contract. We observe that, to date, most of the IaaS cloud providers offer SLAs only in terms of guaranteed availability. With increasing demand and popularity of cloud services, we believe that performance SLAs will also be necessary in the near future. However, performance analysis of a cloud infrastructure is difficult due to a variety of reasons. Hardware (e.g., CPU speed, disk properties), software (e.g., nature of hypervisor), workload (e.g., arrival rate), and many other management characteristics (e.g., placement policy) can impact the overall cloud performance.
