Question

Are there reports or thesis about the performance of Google App Engine or other cloud platforms?
I’am writing an article about how to choose an appropriate cloud platform, and want to reference some test data.

Answer 1

A little work with Google may bring up some material that others have found. For instance the canonical resource for Azure benchmarking is here: http://azurescope.cloudapp.net/. However, there’s not much comparative material as it really doesn’t make sense.

Comparing cloud platforms solely on performance is like comparing apples with bananas with oranges. Each have their own qualities that make them appropriate for a particular kind of application.

For example, in broad terms, for multi-platform use where you have control of the underlying OS, go EC2; for a managed Windows application platform go Azure; or for a managed Java/Python platform choose App Engine. Once you’ve chosen the platform you can pretty much then pay for the performance you need.

Bear in mind too that “performance” means different things for different applications. The application I’m working on, for instance, relies heavily on SQL database performance. That will have a very different performance profile from (say) an application that uses a key-value pair storage system, or an application that’s mostly static HTML.

So, in practice, there aren’t much in the way of performance benchmarks out there because every application is different.