Characterizing Performance of Infrastructure Clouds

Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds typically use system-level virtualization technologies to allow users to deploy custom software stacks, from the operating system upward. Often, the use of virtualization leads to multi-tenancy of the physical hardware where individual resources are shared by multiple users. Furthermore, cloud providers select and configure hardware and software stacks differently. Both multi-tenancy and configuration differences can lead to substantial performance variability. This project will focus on identifying metrics and benchmarks to evaluate the performance of IaaS clouds, furthermore, it will develop necessary tools and frameworks to automate the process of benchmarking and analyzing the performance of IaaS cloud offerings. Automated benchmarking toolkits will enable users to repeatedly evaluate the performance of IaaS clouds as configurations and offerings continually change.