End-To-End Performance Study of Cloud Services

Cloud computing promises a number of advantages for the deployment of data-intensive applications. Most prominently, these include reducing cost with a pay-as-you-go business model and (virtually) unlimited throughput by adding servers if the workload increases. At the Systems Group, ETH Zurich, we did an extensive end-to-end performance study to compare the major cloud offerings regarding their ability to fulfill these promises and their implied cost.

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Going global on EC2

Since its inception, Amazon EC2 has enabled companies to run highly scalable infrastructure with minimal overhead.  Over the years, Amazon Web Services has expanded with new offerings and additional regions around the world.

All this growth has made establishing a global footprint easier than ever.  And yet, most EC2 customers still choose to operate in a single region.  While this is fine for many applications, customers with significant web infrastructure are depriving users of drastically improved performance.  Deploying infrastructure in EC2's new regions cuts out one of the biggest sources of latency: distance.

In this post, I describe how Bizo significantly reduced load times by implementing Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) to distribute traffic across all Amazon regions.

Click here to read more on Bizo's dev blog