Even though I have a very strong Microsoft-legacy, in the past year, my preferred cloud platform has actually been EC2. The reason was simply that I somehow seemed to prefer the IaaS model over PaaS for the use-cases I've worked with during that timeframe.
Given that Windows Azure has recently introduced persistent VM targets, I've decided to run a quick test to compare the performance between similar 64bit Small-sized VMs with Ubuntu 12.04 running on Amazon's EC2 vs. Azure. (Located in Azure's European zone and in AWS' Europe-West).
I've decided to simply run a few CPU-bound tasks and chose the (rather dated, but still) hardinfo benchmark. Please keep in mind that this benchmark only tests for CPU-bound loads, but not for I/O at all.
To re-run these tests on your own machines, you can simply log in to your VMs and install the benchmark tool with "sudo apt-get install hardinfo" and then run it with "sudo hardinfo".
The Numbers
Benchmark | EC2 | Azure |
---|---|---|
Blowfish | 34.403 | 19.975 |
CryptoHash | 39.401 | 85.905 |
Fibonacci | 7.892 | 3.118 |
N-Queens | 25.302 | 9.883 |
FFT | 17.259 | 8.486 |
Raytracing | 16.693 | 9.862 |
Please take these tests results with a grain of salt: they were just the result of about half an hour of free time and a desire to check some of the rumors I've heard regarding EC2's comparably bad performance.
In any case: I personally think that the result warrant a lot more research into performance (and of course also I/O capabilities) of on-demand cloud platforms …
Update (June 15, 2012): I've just had the chance to look into the discrepancy for CryptoHash. Turns out that the benchmark suite uses shorter==better for all tests apart from that one for which an inverse metric is used.
Hi, how do you know these are similar? Did you only take the word 'small' into account or did you take a comparison of 2 evenly priced instances (which could be small vs large for example)
Posted by: Michael | 06/12/2012 at 09:43 AM
Michael: They are equivalent in pricing and seem to be quite similar according to the specification. Both cost 0.08 USD per hour for pay-as-you-go contracts. EC2 specifies small instance as "1.7 GB memory, 1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit" whereas Microsoft specifies them as "1.6GHz CPU, 1.75GB RAM". It seems that Amazon's EC2 Compute Unit is rated at less than Azure's.
Posted by: Ingo Rammer | 06/12/2012 at 09:55 AM