Cloud Computing Price-Performance Could Vary By 1000%!

July 14, 2015 / G C Network / Comments Off

Twitter Feed

The Time is Now for 21st Century Leadership

By G C Network | November 10, 2013

I’ve just had the opportunity to preview my good friend Melvin Greer’s newest effort, “21st Century Leadership: Harnessing Innovation, Accelerating Business Success“. Now in pre-release, this book highlights the compelling…

Public Cloud IaaS : A Price/Performance vs. Security Analysis

By G C Network | October 25, 2013

Industry’s transition from custom made, one-of-a-kind IT infrastructures to the standardize, commodity based cloud paradigm is well on it’s way. IBM’s recent “Under Cloud Cover” study highlights the rapidly of…

Catch the Cloud with DorobekINSIDER LIVE!

By G C Network | October 17, 2013

Yesterday I thoroughly enjoyed an opportunity to participate in the DorobekINSIDER LIVE edition on cloud computing. The conversation was both lively and informative. Joining me on the show were:…

Cloud Shines Brightly as Future of Disaster Response IT

By G C Network | September 14, 2013

The call for help began as a rumble. Twenty miles beneath the ocean’s surface, a rupture in a massive tectonic plate ripped a 310 mile-long break in the sea floor,…

NCOIC/NGA Demonstrates Use of Cloud in Disaster Response

By G C Network | September 5, 2013

When the world’s next major earthquake, tsunami or other disaster hits, military, government and civilian NGA project is available on the NCOIC website. responders will need to manage and…

NBC4 Puts On A Great GovCloud Show !!

By G C Network | August 25, 2013

NBC 4 in Washington, DC highlighted government cloud computing today as part of their GovInnovate show. Below is just a taste of the informative public service they provided. Go to…

OMB’s Evidence Memo: A Call for Cloud Services Brokerage

By G C Network | August 21, 2013

by Ray Holloman and Kevin Jackson In a late July memo the Office of Management and Budget requested cloud services brokerage. Well, not in so many words. Rather, OMB requested…

Cloud Services Brokerage Lessons From Alex Rodriguez, Baseball’s Trade Deadline

By G C Network | August 8, 2013

( A guest post from Ray Holloman, NJVC Corporate Communications) Two stories sat atop baseball’s marquee in the final days of July. The first was the non-waiver trade deadline, baseball’s…

Lessons Learned: VA Cloud Email Termination

By G C Network | July 17, 2013

According to a Federal Computer Week article by Frank Konkel, The Department of Veterans Affairs terminated its five-year, $36 million cloud computing contract for email and calendaring services with HP…

Deconstructing Cloud: An Excellent Guide to the Cloud Computing World

By G C Network | July 15, 2013

On an almost daily basis, I’m approach for my views on “cloud computing technology”. Although typically innocent in nature, I always cringe at the thought of enduring yet another hours…

« Previous
1
…
26
27
28
29
30
…
73
Next »

by Kevin L. Jackson

Yes, you read that right. The price/performance of your cloud computing infrastructure could vary as much as 1000 percent depending on time and location. High levels of variability have actually been seen within the same cloud service provider (CSP) processing the exact same job. This also means that the cost to you of processing the exact same job in the cloud could vary by this much as well.

This surprising result was discovered by a Rice University group, headed by Dr. T. S. Eugene Ng, that has been focusing on cloud computing. Recently they published their joint work with Purdue University: Application-Specific Configuration Selection in the Cloud: Impact of Provider Policy and Potential of Systematic Testing, in the IEEE INFOCOM 2015 Conference Proceedings. That paper took a first step towards understanding the impact of cloud service provider policy and tackling the complexity of selecting configurations that can best meet the price and performance requirements of applications. That work resulted in a collaboration between Rice University and Burstorm, a developer of computer aided design (CAD) software specifically built to support cloud computing architects.

The Burstorm platform contains a product catalog of over 36,000 products across 900 CSP product sets. Working with Dr. Ng’s group, the study looked at seven suppliers across three continents (Asia, North America and Europe) with a total of 266 computer products spread over three locations per vendor, where available. Raw data was collected every day, for 15 days. The results were then normalized to reflect a 720-hour, monthly pricing model. The final output were price-performance metrics graphs that were used to look at performance and price variance both between the CSPs and geographic regions.

Analysis of the final output showed a 622 percent variation of performance within a same instance type and a price/performance variance of 1000 percent. Performance of the exact same virtual machine instance can also vary by as much as 60 percent over time. The best performing instance also did not show the best price-performance. Availability and behavior of instances was also very dependent on location, even when the instance was provisioned by the same CSP. Dave Hansen, Vice President and General Manager of sales, marketing and services for Dell Software sums up the importance of these results saying:

Dave Hansen, VP and General Manager, Dell

“…[This] report is incredibly valuable. I’ve looked at this problem many times over the years and it is very difficult to make buying decisions on cloud services without this context.”

These results also show that today’s enterprise desperately needs to use active metering and monitoring when procuring cloud-based services. Changes in instance types, pricing, performance over time and availability of services by location highlights the inadequacy of traditional benchmarking philosophies and processes. Another hidden gem in this report is the use of “performance quota” by some service providers. When a customer meets this CSP management quota, the performance of the relevant instance will be reduced. In other words, exceeding this limit will drive up your usage bill. These findings also drive home the need for enterprises to ramp up their due diligence when selecting CSPs. They should
also investigate the use of third party brokers and automated solution design tools when developing their cloud migration strategy.

As the use of cloud computing advances, consumers must take active steps toward being more sophisticated, automated and dynamic in their use of cloud service providers. At a minimum, these steps should include:

The use of computer aid design tools when conducting due diligence on cloud service providers;
Use of organic or independent third parties to meter, monitor and report on the performance of cloud-based resources;
Clear understanding of the use and associated limits of “performance quotas”; and
The identification of one or more alternative sources for the provisioning of all cloud-based resources.

This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. For more on these topics, visit Dell’s thought leadership site Power More. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.