StorPool Storage announced the results from a
public cloud performance measurement report, focusing on shared block-storage
services of several providers. The public clouds which are benchmarked are
Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean, DreamHost, OVH, ToggleBox, eApps and other. The
tests are comparing storage systems/offerings, not other aspects, like VM sizes
and plans.
7 virtual machines (VMs), with identical parameters (8 vCPUs, 16GB RAM) and
various pricing (priced $69 to $188), were procured by StorPool from all tested
clouds. Further StorPool procured 7 identical block storage volumes from each
of these providers and attached them as virtual disks to the VMs that were
being tested.
4 different types of tests were performed:
- PGBENCH -
a PostgreSQL database benchmark, perhaps closest to actual application
performance
- Sysbench/mysql -
a second database benchmark for control of PGBENCH results, MySQL based
- fio -
a set of synthetic benchmarks - random reads/writes, sequential
reads/writes, latency measurements
- rsync -
copying files and syncing, simulating rapid deployment and backup
workloads
In the FULL REPORT you can read more about the testing methodology
and detailed results.
Results Summary
The results from the tests show significant difference between the
offerings of the benchmarked public clouds, in all meaningful metrics - latency
(the number 1 metric of any cloud), IOPS, MB/s and
price.
Conclusions
Few conclusions are drawn from the tests:
- Most
shared-storage offerings you can get in a public cloud are painfully slow
for running databases and demanding apps, with a few exceptions
- Offerings
which are the same on paper, perform very, very differently. Ranging from
"is this thing working at all", to "Just WOW"
- There
is several fold difference in the price of the seemingly same service
- The
difference in price performance of shared storage services is even higher
than the variance in price or the variance in performance alone
- Surprisingly,
nor the best price, nor the best price-performance ratios are not found in
the most popular services on the market
You can review the full measurement report here: https://storpool.com/blog/public-cloud-performance-measurement-report