A Comparison of System Performance on a Private OpenStack Cloud and Amazon EC2

Cloud computing is becoming increasingly pervasive and is being adopted even for high performance computing and mission critical applications. As cloud computing extends its usage, understanding of its performance becomes more important. In this paper, we present the system performance using Amazon EC2, representing a large public cloud platform, and OpenStack, representing the most popular open-source infrastructure-as-a-service cloud platform that can be used to implement both private and public clouds. Our study covers the performance of all significant cloud infrastructure resources - CPU, memory, storage, and network. We compare the performance of the public Amazon EC2 and a private OpenStack platform with similar configurations using several benchmarks. We compare and analyze diverse performance aspects based on different hypervisor, storage, and/or network configurations. For the OpenStack platform, we measure virtualization overhead for each resource. We also investigated the performance impact of more advanced features of each cloud, including faster storage options of AWS and the Infiniband network fabric with the Chameleon OpenStack platform.